Cuito Cuanavale and the Break from Western Capitalist and Racist Domination: Africa’s Debt to Cuba

Horace Campbell

25 Feb 2026

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Cuban soldiers who fought in Angola. Source: TelesurEnglish.

Campbell explains how Cuban military and medical interventions have been decisive in the liberation of African peoples from colonial domination.

Originally published in Pambazuka News.

“The history of Africa will be written as that of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale”[1] Fidel Castro

The government of the United States is attempting to crush the Cuban Revolution. This is an effort that has been undertaken since 1959 with invasions (Bay of Pigs), executions, sabotage, biological and chemical warfare, sanctions, blockades, trade embargoes and every possible measure that a government could undertake to overthrow a regime. These projects failed. The Cuban independence project survived.

In 2026, in the aftermath of the capture of the President of Venezuela, and the blocking of free travel across the Caribbean, it is now being said that the Venezuela operation was but a dress rehearsal for the removal of the Cuban government. This is the moment when people around the world are calling for recognition of the debt owed to the Cuban people for their struggle to uphold the principles of independence and self-determination. This intervention calls for support for the Cuban people while reminding us of their role in challenging the myths of white supremacy and the supposed superiority of the capitalist system.

The Cuban commitment to self-determination was forged through independence struggles in the 19th century and has been sustained ever since, all while living ninety miles from the United States. This history means the Cuban people carry concrete, lived experience in resisting colonial and neocolonial domination. In this period of profound trials for Cuba, it is essential that we join with others in reminding the world of what Africans owe them.

Over the course of the international struggles to defeat apartheid, Cuba dispatched more than 337,000 soldiers and 43,000 civilians to defend the Angolan people against a regime that represented the most extreme expression of white racist power. The 1988 victory at Cuito Cuanavale marked a seismic turning point in African and world history, delivering a decisive strategic blow to apartheid and announcing in unmistakable terms that the liberation of southern Africa could not be reversed.

By halting the South African Defence Force (SADF), the combined Angolan and Cuban forces shattered the long-standing myth of Pretoria's military invincibility. This battlefield triumph fundamentally altered the region's political landscape, forcing the South African government to abandon its military ambitions and engage in the diplomatic negotiations that would eventually redraw the map of Southern Africa. The battle at Cuito Cuanavale was, up to that point, the largest military engagement on African soil since World War II and the defeat of General Rommel at El Alamein in 1942. That battle was the turning point in the defeat of fascism, just as the victory at Cuito Cuanavale became a turning point for African independence and the opening of a new road toward social and economic transformation.

Despite being driven out of Angola in defeat, most students across Africa know little or nothing of this extraordinary military and diplomatic battle. Every child in Europe learns in school about the struggles against fascism, yet in Africa the imperial counter-narrative has worked hard to obscure what actually happened. Apartheid apologists insisted that the South African army was never defeated, framing Pretoria's withdrawal as a voluntary retreat toward negotiation made possible by the approaching end of the Cold War. American pundits took the lead in advancing the idea that it was the United States that brokered peace in southern Africa and brought apartheid to its close.[2] The African National Congress (ANC) government has been complicit in this erasure. For the ANC leadership, teaching the truth about Cuito Cuanavale would undermine the myth that the ANC itself was the singular force that ended apartheid. It is this same evasiveness that explains why South Africa today is not taking the lead within BRICS to oppose the current U.S. blockade and the campaign to strangle the Cuban people economically. For the intellectual defenders of apartheid dominating the Universities and educational apparatus, the notion that white forces could be defeated in battle was and is simply inadmissible.

For a brief period after the ANC came to power, the South African government hosted the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. This was a moment when the push for reparative justice was high on the global agenda. But as the post-apartheid project increasingly oriented itself around the promotion of Black capitalism and the rise of figures such as Patrice Motsepe, Jacob Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a virtual silence descended over the sacrifices made by the peoples of Southern Africa and Cuba in the struggle to end apartheid. To this author's knowledge, Ronnie Kasrils stands alone among former ANC liberation leaders in writing seriously about the significance of Cuito Cuanavale. Kasrils rightly described the battle as the "Stalingrad of Apartheid" — a decisive strategic defeat that forced the South African regime to concede Namibian independence and confront its own eventual demise. [3]The outcome directly accelerated Namibian independence and the broader process that led to the dismantling of apartheid and the formation of the African Union.

Fidel Castro summed up the importance of this event when he stated that, “The history of Africa will be written as that of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale”

Nelson Mandela noted that Cuito Cuanavale was a symbol. The battles at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa . . . Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.”[4]

In this commentary we will deploy a fractal analysis of the break from recursive patterns of white supremacy that is represented by the struggles of the peoples of Africa and Cuba. Critical perspectives on the obsession of elements of the US ruling class in its opposition to the Cuban revolution highlight that the opposition to Cuba is often rooted in a White Supremacist framework that seeks to restore the pre-revolutionary racial and class hierarchies. If white supremacy matured over 400 years, it would be premature and reductive to claim that one battle could dismantle apartheid and racial capitalism entirely. In this commentary, we want to underline the importance of the indelible break from the enduring myth of white supremacy. Racial Capitalism and white supremacy had functioned as a fixed systemic constant, a recursive loop of perceived invincibility that dictated the "physics" of African geopolitics by rendering black resistance seemingly futile. The victory at Cuito Cuanavale acted as a definitive symmetry break, transforming a seemingly ‘eternal’ rule into a shattered variable and triggering a structural collapse of the entire apartheid system.

As the progressive community rallies in solidarity with the Cuban people, this commentary invites the reader to consider ten interconnected episodes that together illuminate the depth and durability of the relationship between the Cuban revolutionary process and the peoples of Africa. These episodes are not discrete or isolated events. They constitute a cumulative historical architecture, each one building upon and reinforcing the others, tracing a continuous thread from the ideological foundations of anti-colonial thought through to the contemporary struggle against imperial strangulation. Taken together, they reveal the fractal logic of Cuban-African solidarity — a pattern of mutual commitment that repeats and deepens across different theatres, different decades, and different forms of struggle, culminating in a rupture from which there can be no return.

The ten episodes are organized as follows:

I. The Foundational Ideological Framework: Anti-Colonialism, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Revolutionary Internationalism.

II. First Engagements: Algeria and Zanzibar in the Early 1960s.

III. The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba and Its Global Reverberations: Victor Dreke and Che Guevara in the Congo, 1965.

IV. Cuban Support for Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and the PAIGC, 1965–1974.

V. Amilcar Cabral and the Weapon of Theory

VI Angola: From Operation Carlota to Cuito Cuanavale, 1975–

VII. Ethiopia and the Ogaden War: Solidarity Under Pressure.

VIII. Medical Internationalism and the Long Arc of Revolutionary Care, 1963–2026: From Early Missions to Fighting Ebola and Biological Warfare.

IX. Cultural and Educational Dimensions of Cuban African Solidarity.

X. The Contemporary Conjuncture: Imperial Efforts to Strangulate Cuba and the New Point of No Return.

We begin this reflection on Cuito Cuanavale and the historic break from the recursive logic of white supremacy with the idea of our common humanity, an idea that was forcefully placed on the historical agenda by the defeat of the apartheid army. The African philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, expressed in the foundational principle that a person is a person through other persons, provides the deepest grounding for this idea. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the great peace activists of the twentieth century who understood the indivisibility of that humanity. In his opposition to the war against the Vietnamese people, he warned that a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

King recognized the possibility of a genuine break with the old mechanistic, atomistic, and deterministic paradigms that construct human beings as rational actors driven by competition, greed, and self-interested calculation. Ubuntu offers a counter-paradigm rooted not in the isolated individual but in the web of mutual obligation and shared existence that constitutes genuine community. That break from a recursive system that endlessly reproduces its own logic is precisely what the victory at Cuito Cuanavale made concrete and irreversible, and it is what the African philosophical tradition has always known.

I. The Foundational Ideological Framework: Anti-Colonialism, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Revolutionary Internationalism

Cuba's engagement with Global Africa was not primarily strategic in the Cold War realist sense. It was rooted in the revolution's understanding of Cuba itself as an Afro-Latin nation with deep and unresolved ties to the African continent. Fidel Castro was among the first heads of state to articulate what C.L.R. James would later theorize as the revolutionary Black world — the Global African experience understood as a shared historical community bound by reciprocal obligations. The centrality of the African presence in Cuba's own independence struggle, from Antonio Maceo onward, constituted what Havana called its historical duty to support African liberation. Cuba did not identify with Africa merely as a fellow Third World nation. It understood itself as part of the same anti colonial community, defined its revolutionary identity from 1959 as explicitly anti-racist, and made opposition to apartheid and colonial racism central to what the Cuban revolution meant.

This ideological foundation found its counterpart across the African continent and with anti-racist fighters in the belly of the beast such as Malcolm X. The connection between anti racism, liberation and full independence had been articulated by every major political movement and leader in twentieth century Africa. Yet every significant leader who demanded genuine sovereignty was branded a communist. Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Félix Moumié, Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto, Nelson Mandela, Assata Shakur and Deolinda Rodrigues — each of them found that the articulation of freedom was treated as subversion within the Cold War media ecosystem. The African Liberation Committee of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)withstood this sustained disinformation campaign and continued to support the decolonization of the continent.

It was in Angola that these converging forces came into sharpest conflict. The communist branding of African liberation movements became the ideological instrument through which the United States and apartheid South Africa forged their alliance against Angolan independence. That alliance endured for over four decades, systematically delaying the liberation of Southern Africa, until it was broken decisively on the battlefield at Cuito Cuanavale. The shared ideological foundations of Cuban internationalism and African liberation were not merely rhetorical — they were tested and proven in blood, and it is that common ground that makes the victory at Cuito Cuanavale inseparable from the broader story of both Cuban and African freedom.

II. First Engagements: Algeria, Zanzibar and the Early 1960s

Cuba began its engagement with Africa almost immediately after the revolution. In 1961, Cuba sent weapons to the Algerian National Liberation Front as it fought for independence from France. The ship Casablanca carried arms to North Africa and returned to Cuba with wounded fighters and war orphans who received medical care. When the French were defeated after the epic struggles, when Algeria achieved independence in 1962 most French doctors left the country at once. Cuba responded in 1963 by sending fifty-eight medical professionals. This act became the model for many later missions in medical internationalism. From the beginning Cuba linked military assistance with public health support and combined solidarity with efforts to build new national institutions.[5] Piero Gleijeses has written extensively on Cuban support for African freedom fighters drawing extensively from his unprecedented access to Cuba's closed archives. This access had been granted by Jorge Risquet Valdés, the senior Cuban official who served as Fidel Castro's primary advisor and ‘point person’ for African affairs.

Drawing directly on Piero Gleijeses’s research, especially his 1996 article and his 2002 book, the evidence shows that Cuba pursued an independent revolutionary internationalist policy in Algeria from 1961 to 1965. It was guided by anti-imperialist commitments rather than by Soviet direction. Gleijeses documents Cuba’s military and humanitarian support for the National Liberation Front and for the post-independence government. He details deliveries of weapons, treatment and care for war orphans, and the dispatch of a Cuban military task force to assist Algeria during the 1963 border conflict with Morocco.

The politico/diplomatic work and the writings of Frantz Fanon helped many readers around the world understand the importance of the Algerian struggle. Yet the present leadership in Algeria often reduces Fanon’s role and reduces the historical importance of Cuban support for Algerian independence. Algeria is a major oil producer, and it now operates a sovereign wealth fund known as the Revenue Regulation Fund. The most recent internationally tracked snapshot places the fund at about $16.3 billion United States dollars in assets. Algeria has the resources and capacity to offer meaningful support to Cuba, yet it chooses not to act at the scale its wealth allows. At the same time the leadership restricts its youth from learning the true history of their liberation struggle, limiting an honest understanding of the role played by international solidarity in winning independence.

In East Africa, the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution introduced a new and influential force in radical African politics. As Amrit Wilson shows, the United States worked hard to curb this radical momentum by restricting emerging ties between Cuba and Zanzibar. [6]This period also saw figures such as Ali Mahfud Mohamed, who headed the Zanzibar Nationalist Party’s office in Havana and facilitated Cuban linkages before the revolution, further deepening external ideological networks that Washington sought to disrupt. At the same time, the Tanzanian army (then the Tanganyika army, later the TPDF) became an increasingly decisive force in shaping events, as Tanganyika’s leadership engaged directly with Zanzibar’s revolutionary factions and later absorbed the island into a union that strategically constrained its radical experiments. Mahfudh later played a notable role after Mozambican independence, when he went to Maputo to serve as a defence adviser to President Samora Machel—a work remembered for its contribution to Mozambique’s efforts to resist apartheid-era South African destabilisation.

III. The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba and Its Global Reverberations: Victor Dreke and Che Guevara in Congo, 1965

When Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961, anti-colonial movements across the world recognized the gravity of the crime and affirmed their commitment to support the people of the Congo in their struggle for genuine independence. The same anticommunist forces from Belgium, South Africa and the United States that orchestrated Lumumba’s killing were also involved in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. In White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, Susan Williams draws on declassified documents to expose how the CIA conducted covert operations to undermine African nationalist leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. Books on the Dulles Brothers have exposed the worldview of the military and intelligence networks that targeted revolutionary movements and that continued to direct operations against Cuba. [7]The United States and its ally Mobutu Sese Seko carried out massive violence in Congo, deploying paratroopers and backing Belgian and French intervention in order to secure Mobutu’s rule, a campaign that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

The alliance between Cuba and African liberation forces deepened at the United Nations General Assembly in 1964 when Che Guevara addressed the world. During meetings held on the sidelines of the General Assembly, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and A M Babu agreed to send a Cuban team to support the freedom fighters in the Congo. Four months after this meeting Malcolm X was assassinated.[8] Cuba intensified its support for the anti-colonial forces in the Congo. Victor Dreke and Che Guevara’s secret mission to eastern Congo in 1965 marked Cuba’s first major military engagement in Africa. Guevara led a Cuban expeditionary force in support of Laurent Kabila’s Lumumbist rebels who were fighting the Mobutu regime backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Victor Dreke, the Afro-Cuban commander who served in this mission, documented the Cuban perspective on African liberation and described how the campaign fostered new forms of cooperation between Cuba and Tanzania.[9]

When the Cubans realized that Kabila lacked the political discipline and organizational capacity needed for a successful guerrilla campaign, they withdrew. Both Dreke and Guevara concluded that the Congolese leadership did not yet possess ideological clarity, political maturity nor the level of mass organization required for sustained revolutionary struggle. Guevara left the Congo with renewed purpose to oppose Yankee imperialism. The mission helped build important relationships and led to the training of young Congolese activists who continued their studies in Cuba. These exchanges strengthened Cuba’s long-term role in supporting African liberation movements. The experience in the Congo also broadened Guevara’s insight into the political and social conditions that can help a revolutionary movement succeed.

IV. Cuban Support for Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and the PAIGC, 1965–1974

The relationship between Cuba and FRELIMO[10] is especially significant for Syracuse University students and faculty. Mondlane resigned from his faculty position in the Anthropology Department at Syracuse University in early 1963 to dedicate himself fully to the Mozambican liberation struggle. He then moved to Dar es Salaam, establishing his base of operations there as the newly elected president of FRELIMO. Che Guevara and Eduardo Mondlane met in Dar es Salaam while both were involved in the networks of African liberation movements based in the city. Their time in Tanzania overlapped during the mid-1960s, when Dar es Salaam served as a major hub for revolutionary exchanges among figures like Mondlane and Guevara.

FRELIMO of Mozambique, PAIGC[11] of Guinea and Cape Verde, and MPLA were all liberation movements rooted in African nationalism and anti-colonial ideology, each committed to ending Portuguese rule in their respective territories. All three organizations embraced forms of socialism and Marxist-influenced thought, drawing on the ideas of figures like Amílcar Cabral and aligning at different times with the Soviet Union, China, or broader Pan-African left currents. Together they worked within transnational networks such as the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP), sharing ideological frameworks and strategies that linked their struggles across Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde, and Angola.[12]

In January 1966, Havana hosted the landmark Tricontinental Conference — 500 delegates from 82 countries including virtually every African liberation movement: the ANC, ZAPU, MPLA, SWAPO, FRELIMO, PAIGC. Cuba used the conference to institutionalize a framework for coordinated anti-imperialist struggle across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, founding OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America). The Tricontinental magazine and OSPAAAL's internationally distributed propaganda posters became major vehicles of Third World political culture throughout the 1970s. Che Guevara's "Message to the Tricontinental" — calling for "two, three, many Vietnams" — was published by OSPAAAL in 1967. The conference represented Cuba's most ambitious attempt to position itself as the organizational hub of global decolonization, independent of both Soviet and Chinese tutelage — a claim that generated friction with both Moscow and Beijing, who resented Havana's autonomous Third Worldism. It was at this moment when Cuba took a leading role in the nonaligned movement.

V. Amilcar Cabral and the Weapon of Theory

Cuba's relationship with Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC proved to be among its most intellectually and politically significant African engagements. Guevara had met Cabral during his 1965 African tour and recognized in the PAIGC something qualitatively different from the Congolese situation: a disciplined mass political movement with deep organic links to the peasantry, its own theory of liberation culture, and a leadership that refused to import foreign revolutionary models uncritically. Cabral's famous dictum that Cuba could not provide mountains, so Guineans had "to become the mountain themselves," captures the terms of engagement. Cuba sent military advisors (50–60 at any time), arms and medicine from 1965 onward. Cuban doctors embedded with PAIGC guerrillas in the liberated zones from 1966, simultaneously treating fighters and training local health workers — a dual military-medical model unique to that campaign. Guinea-Bissau won independence from Portugal in 1974, and Cuba subsequently assisted in establishing one of Africa's first post-colonial medical faculties in the country.

For Amilcar Cabral intellectual and ideological independence begins with the insistence that liberation movements must root their strategies in the historical and social realities of their own societies, rather than copying models from abroad. Amílcar Cabral warned that many national movements suffered from “ideological deficiency,” meaning they adopted slogans or borrowed theories without understanding their own class structures or internal contradictions. He argued that genuine liberation required a scientific analysis of local conditions so that the movement could define its own objectives, identify its own allies and adversaries, and avoid reproducing colonial hierarchies after independence.[13]

Cabral’s theory also emphasized that ideological independence depended on recognizing that not all members of a colonized society shared the same interests. Some social groups benefited from colonial rule and could not be expected to support national liberation, a reality that liberation leaders had to confront rather than evade through vague appeals to “the people.” This perspective placed political education and theoretical clarity at the heart of revolutionary practice, since only by understanding class relations and material conditions could movements avoid manipulation by internal elites or external powers.

Amílcar Cabral delivered his famous address “The Weapon of Theory” at the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966. It was in Cuba where the liberation movements were grappling with the emerging Sino Soviet disputations where these themes of intellectual and ideological clarity, as Cabral addressed an international gathering of movements seeking to define a unified anti-imperialist front. There he argued that solidarity required more than shared slogans: each struggle must produce its own ideological tools, its own analyses, and its own forms of organization. He pointed to the Cuban Revolution as an example of a people forging an authentically grounded ideology that shaped a “new life” and a “New Man,” and he encouraged African, Asian, and Latin American movements to develop similarly independent intellectual frameworks rooted in their specific histories.

VI. Angola: From Operation Carlota to Cuito Cuanavale, 1975–1991

Of the societies with the greatest debt to the Cuban people, Angola stands out.

Angolan independence on November 11, 1975 was achieved in the midst of war and imperial destruction in Africa. It is not here necessary to detain the reader with the machinations of the United States in Africa after the military coup d'etat in Portugal in 1974 and the military defeat of the United States in Vietnam in April 1975. The military defeat of the USA in Vietnam had a direct bearing on the thinking of Henry Kissinger and the Foreign Policy Establishment in determining that the USA had to intervene in Africa to combat ‘Soviet expansionism.’ In short, the independence of Angola was not an aspiration based on the will for self-determination, but the Angolans were simply puppets of external forces. Incorrect analysis and flawed understanding of the self-determination project were bound to lead to the military, political and moral defeat for USA and South Africa.

The historical record is now open with reams of texts to document how the United States government encouraged the apartheid army to intervene in Angola in 1975 in a failed attempt to derail the independence of Angola. The Cuban mission in Angola in 1975 was named Operation Carlota in honor of Carlota Lucumí, an African-born enslaved woman who led a major rebellion at the Triunvirato sugar plantation in Matanzas on November 5, 1843.

It is worth restating why the archives of the South African state institutions are unreliable in conveying the extent of the importance of the victory of the peoples of Angola and Southern Africa in 1975. The Cubans have opened their archives to the scholar Pierro Gleijeses who documented the history of Cuban involvement in the war of 1975-1976. The book Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa provide one of the most comprehensive studies of the role of the Cubans in the 1975 war. Yet, the documentation of Pierro Gleijeses has a clear deficiency in so far as the documentation does not cover the extent of the conspiracy against Africa that culminated in the assassination of Murtala Mohammed throwing Nigeria into a spiral of deepening counter revolution that had gained a fillip in the genocidal wars to enrich the oil companies and their surrogates in Nigeria from that historical moment. Neither does his second book do justice to the influential diplomatic work undertaken by leaders such as Julius Nyerere and the Frontline States of Southern Africa.

Thus far, the Angolan rendition of that war is memorialized by the state, without a coherent intellectual paradigm that is linked to African independence. A small memorial site at the Battle of Quifangondo has been constructed, but the real details and importance of this battle are not known to youths. The most prolific scholarship has come out of the USA consistent with the negative energies that had been invested in that failed enterprise to support apartheid in Angola. John Stockwell, the CIA operative who had coordinated with the Kissinger committee to support the Zairian army of Mobutu and the South African state has documented this war in the book, In Search of Enemies.[14] Books with titles such as Angola and the Politics of Intervention: From Local Bush War to Chronic Crisis in Southern Africa cemented the Cold War narrative that was imposed on an African independence struggle.[15] But despite the political and military defeat of the USA and the South African apartheid army, the events around the independence of Angola in 1976 were only the dress rehearsal for the extent of the destruction that was awaiting Africa in the next twenty years.

Angola Part II: From Operation Carlota to Cuito Cuanavale

The road to Cuito Cuanavale was shaped by the intensity of the anticommunist fire of the Reagan and Thatcher period of neo liberalism and counter revolution. “In this tense period—when the Soviet army was bogged down in Afghanistan and strategic missteps and heightened frictions between Havana, Luanda, and Moscow—the Cuban-Angolan alliance endured a series of political and military strains. Yet these pressures ultimately set the stage for their greatest triumph: the historic victory at Cuito Cuanavale, which decisively shifted the regional balance of power. Between 1985 and 1987, the Angolan military command, advised by Soviet generals, launched a series of frontal assaults against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA[16] positions that Fidel Castro had explicitly warned against. Castro characterized the Soviet-influenced offensive strategy as a mistake, one that nearly produced a catastrophe for Angolan forces. The Cuban position, which emphasized flexibility and terrain-sensitive tactics, had been rejected by the Angolan leadership, and the consequences proved severe.

In July 1987, FAPLA[17] launched Operation Salute in October, deploying four reinforced brigades with Soviet air defense systems toward Mavinga. The combined UNITA and South African forces halted the FAPLA advance at the Lomba River, after which the South African Defence Force (SADF) launched Operation Modular, a four-phase campaign whose ultimate objective was the capture of Cuito Cuanavale. The SADF committed approximately 9,000 troops across nine battalions, including elite white units and Namibian conscripts from the territorial forces. Two of those conscript battalions mutinied during the battle, refusing to serve as what they described as cannon fodder for UNITA. The political context intensified the stakes considerably.

The assassination of Mozambican President Samora Machel in October 1986, when his plane came down in South African territory, galvanized the Frontline States and deepened Cuban commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle. Castro had attended the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Harare in September 1986 and stated Cuba's unconditional opposition to apartheid, explicitly rejecting the linkage arguments advanced by Washington and Pretoria. Following Machel's death, Cuban revolutionary leadership moved to monitor the Angolan theatre with greater precision and urgency.

When the Angolans requested Cuban assistance to defend Cuito Cuanavale, Castro made the most decisive intervention of the entire conflict. On November 15, 1987, he authorized Operation Maniobra XXXI Aniversario del Desembarco del Granma, committing Cuba's most modern tanks, virtually all its mobile anti-aircraft systems, and its best pilots to Angola. Before this decision, there were 38,000 Cuban soldiers in Angola. By August 1988, that number had risen to 55,000. It is worth registering the full scale of Cuban commitment across the entire Angolan operation: Cuba deployed more than 337,000 military personnel over the course of the struggle, a figure that speaks not to Cold War calculation but to the depth of revolutionary solidarity with African liberation. Cuba's own territorial defense was made vulnerable by this deployment, a sacrifice that underscored the revolution's understanding of African liberation as a matter of principle rather than geopolitical strategy.

The first Cuban special forces arrived in Cuito Cuanavale on December 5, 1987, and immediately reorganized the command structure and defensive positions. In major engagements in January, February, and March 1988, the SADF failed repeatedly to take the town. South African forces fired more than 20,000 artillery projectiles per day without adequate air cover, while thousands of mines destroyed their armored vehicles. By the end of March, the siege had collapsed. The SADF was effectively trapped on the eastern bank of the Cuito River, bogged down by the rainy season and unable to advance.

Fidel Castro's strategic genius lay in his understanding that Cuito Cuanavale was not the end but the pivot. As he later described it, the defense of Cuito Cuanavale was the left hand that blocked the blow, while the right hand assembled Cuban, Angolan, and SWAPO forces for a southwestern offensive that surrounded the South African forces and brought their entire Angolan campaign to a decisive end. [18] Cuban engineers and Angolan construction workers then built two complete airstrips on the Namibian border in under two months, establishing air superiority at the very threshold of apartheid's regional power.

The human and political cost to apartheid South Africa proved unsustainable. The mass opposition to apartheid in the townships meant that the South African army was overstretched. White conscripts were returning home from Angola in body bags, and the End Conscription Campaign among young white South Africans was gaining momentum. Senior SADF commanders acknowledged internally that white casualties were becoming a serious political problem. It was at this point that South Africa agreed to direct negotiations with the Cubans and Angolans, negotiations the Reagan administration had previously refused to countenance by insisting the Cubans were merely Soviet proxies. Chester Crocker, the principal American diplomat, moved urgently to provide South Africa with a diplomatic exit from a military defeat it could no longer deny.[19]

The Military and Diplomatic Endgame

Trapped and militarily exhausted, South Africa entered negotiations with the Cubans and Angolans brokered by U.S. representative Chester Crocker, whose talks began in London in May 1988 and continued through Cairo in June. Despite their defeat on the battlefield, the South African negotiating team entered the talks without genuine intention of honoring UN Resolution 435 on Namibian independence. Defence Minister Malan and President P.W. Botha insisted South Africa would withdraw from Angola only if Soviet forces and their allies did the same, conspicuously avoiding any mention of withdrawing from Namibia. Cuban delegation leader Jorge Risquet exposed this bad faith directly, telling the South Africans that the time for military adventures pursued with impunity was over, and that South Africa would not obtain at the negotiating table what it had failed to achieve on the battlefield.

That lesson was delivered conclusively at Tchipa on June 27, 1988, when South African forces attempted to break out of the encirclement and were decisively defeated. More than twenty-six white conscripts died in the engagement. In an air battle over the Calueque dam, the Angolan air force demonstrated that South African control of the skies was finished, a devastating symbolic reversal given that the same dam had served as the launching point for South Africa's original invasion of Angola thirteen years earlier. South African forces fled on foot across the border. The news of the defeat accelerated white resistance to the draft at home, and the South African press described the battle as a crushing humiliation. South Africa had no option remaining but to negotiate in earnest.

The Long War and Angola's Debt to Cuba

Of all the peoples of Southern Africa, it is the Angolans who owe the greatest debt to Cuba, for it was on Angolan soil that the decisive battles were fought and it was the Cuban commitment of military personnel over nearly three decades that made Angolan sovereignty possible. The withdrawal of South African forces from Angola did not end the destruction. UNITA, sustained by conservatives in the United States, South Africa, and Burkina Faso, continued fighting through a failed peace accord in 1991, elections in 1992 that UNITA lost and then refused to accept, and a regional war that drew in Angola's neighbors and did not end until Jonas Savimbi was killed in battle in February 2002. The end of that war brought to a close thirty-seven years of uninterrupted destruction spanning five distinct phases: the anti-colonial struggle against Portugal up to 1974, the first war of independence from 1975 to 1980, the intensified war against South African occupation from 1981 to 1988, the post-election war from 1992 to 1994, and the deadliest phase of all, from 1996 to 2002, when UNITA sought to bring the war to every province in the country. That this nation survived and ultimately prevailed is inseparable from the revolutionary solidarity of the Cuban people.

Today, the current society seeks to conciliate the elements of UNITA under the banner of reconciliation. Angolan elite capital flows overwhelmingly into Portugal, which remains the largest and best-documented destination for investments abroad. Significant sums are also believed to be routed through offshore jurisdictions—including Switzerland—where wealthy Angolans frequently establish intermediary companies to hold assets outside Africa. For the comprador elements in Angola, support for Cuba in this historical moment is the furthest question away from their agendas.

VII. Ethiopia and Other Military Engagements

Cuba simultaneously maintained military presences across multiple African theatres. After the first defeat of the USA and South Africa in 1976, the United States, France, Morocco and Saudi Arabia went into full gear to create a strong anticommunist front in Africa. The Ethiopian Revolution in 1974 had brought the Derg to power in Addis Ababa. The Derg requested Cuban assistance when the USA and its allies supported the Somali invasion of Ogaden in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, Cuba sent 12,000–16,000 troops in 1977–78 to assist the Derg regime against the Somali invasion of the Ogaden — a more controversial engagement given the Derg's brutal internal repression, which exposed the tensions between Cuban revolutionary principles and the demands of Soviet-aligned realpolitik. It was in Ethiopia where Cuba showed its political principles clearly. The Cuban government refused to support the Derg in the battles against the Eritrean independence movement.

Cuban military and medical presence extended to Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, and support networks for SWAPO (Namibia), ZAPU (Zimbabwe), and the ANC (South Africa). The ANC's military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, trained at Cuban-run camps in Angola from 1977.

VIII. Medical Internationalism and the Long Arc of Revolutionary Care, 1963–2026

Running parallel to and ultimately outlasting the military engagements, Cuba's medical presence in Africa constitutes one of the most extensive and consequential programs of South-South cooperation in history. To understand how Cuba became capable of this extraordinary international contribution, one must understand the internal transformation of Cuban medicine after 1959. As Don Fitz documents in Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution, the revolutionary government dismantled the pre-existing elite medical system oriented toward private practice and rebuilt it from the ground up around the principle of prevention, community-based care, and the training of physicians as social actors rather than market professionals. Cuba developed a polyclinic model that embedded doctors and nurses directly within neighborhoods, creating one of the most comprehensive primary care systems in the world. This foundation, combined with massive investment in medical education and biotechnology, produced a surplus of highly trained health workers whose skills were offered freely to the world's poorest peoples as an expression of revolutionary solidarity rather than commercial interest. Cuba's capacity to combat dengue fever further illustrates this depth of expertise. Through its integrated surveillance system, community mobilization, and vector control programs, Cuba developed protocols for containing dengue outbreaks that have been studied and adopted across the Global South, demonstrating that epidemiological mastery built at home can be deployed with devastating effectiveness against infectious disease abroad.

Between 1960 and 2000, Cuba dispatched an average of 3,350 health workers annually to developing countries, of whom 31,181 served across 33 African nations over four decades. Cuba built or helped establish nine medical faculties on the continent between 1963 and 2004, including in Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Uganda, Ghana, Gambia, and Equatorial Guinea. By 1984, 1,800 students from 75 developing nations, the majority African, were receiving medical training in Cuba. The founding of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana in 1999 deepened this commitment further, enrolling students from across sub-Saharan Africa on full scholarships with the explicit obligation to return and serve in underserved communities.

Cuba was inspired to develop its medical facilities after the USA launched a series of biological warfare attacks against Cuba. The outbreak of Dengue fever in the Caribbean in 1977 was followed by an even bigger outbreak in Cuba in 1981. In 1981, a severe dengue hemorrhagic fever epidemic in Cuba, which caused 158 deaths including 101 children, led to allegations of U.S.-sponsored biological warfare. Fidel Castro stated categorically the virus was introduced by the CIA, citing the unusual, simultaneous outbreak in three separate locations. While the National Security Archive documents various, often failed, CIA actions against Cuban livestock during this era, direct, definitive proof linking the U.S. government to the 1981 dengue outbreak remains a subject of intense historical debate rather than a widely accepted,

1981 Epidemic & Allegations: The 1981 outbreak involved the dengue-2 strain, which was not previously endemic in Cuba. Cuban officials and various technical reports suggested the rapid spread was not natural, proposing the virus was artificially introduced.
The 1981 Context: In July 1981, Castro publicly alleged that "Yankee imperialism" might have introduced the plague. [20]

The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs documents refer to this event as a "sinister act of biological warfare" as described in certain academic or political narratives. These episodes underscore the need for a strong international treaty on biological weapons—one that the United States should fully support and sign.

Ebola and Biological Warfare

As defined by Harriet Washington, bioterrorism utilizes microorganisms—bacteria, viruses, and fungi—or their derivatives to sicken or kill via infection and poisoning. While these agents can occur naturally, their systematic deployment by state actors transforms biological science into a weapon of political control.[21]

During the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, the Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF) institutionalized this practice as a strategic instrument of counter-insurgency and white supremacy. By targeting nationalist guerrillas, rural African communities, and essential livestock, the RSF initiated the largest recorded anthrax outbreak in history. Once dismissed as wartime rumor, the veracity of these operations was later substantiated by intelligence chiefs Ken Flower and Henrik Ellert, who documented the transition from conventional defense to clandestine biological warfare.[22]

These doctrinal foundations were further refined in neighboring South Africa through "Project Coast." Under the direction of Dr. Wouter Basson, this secretive initiative expanded beyond traditional military applications to develop weaponized pathogens and specialized delivery systems tailored for use against anti-apartheid activists. Evidence presented before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reveals that these programs did not operate in isolation; Project Coast served as a logistical conduit, supplying the RSF with anthrax and cholera cultures in the late 1970s. This regional infrastructure was bolstered in the 1980s by American physician Larry Ford, who provided Basson’s operatives with cultures of typhoid, botulism, and anthrax while consulting on offensive techniques.[23]

This history illustrates a recursive pattern where imperial powers, having historically extracted African labor and resources, generated the very scientific infrastructure in which dangerous pathogens were studied and weaponized. While there is no conclusive scientific evidence that hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola were "created" via these programs, the historical convergence is significant. The 1967 Marburg outbreak among European lab workers and the 1980s interest of Cold War planners in filoviruses reflect an institutional framework where the Global North controls the means of both biological threat and medical response.

The 2014 intervention of Cuban medical internationalism in West Africa, which reduced Ebola mortality from 50% to 20%, represents a structural counter to this cycle. As Washington argues in Medical Apartheid, when ethical safeguards collapse under the guise of public health, biomedical authority is easily twisted into a tool of state repression. Project Coast remains a definitive example of this danger, demonstrating how ideology and secrecy can transform medical science into a weapon against oppressed populations.

IX. Cultural and Educational Dimensions

Often underemphasized in the literature on the relationship between Cuba and Global Africa is the cultural dimension of Cuba-Africa relations which is rich and reciprocal. Cuba's own musical traditions — particularly son, rumba, and salsa — carry profound African retentions, and the 1950s-60s saw intensive musical dialogue between Congolese and Cuban artists. OSPAAAL's poster art became a significant vernacular of Third World visual culture. Cuba trained thousands of African teachers, agronomists, engineers, and artists. Educational scholarships — free tuition, housing, and stipend — enabled generations of Africans from Guinea, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, and later South Africa to study in Havana. The Non-Aligned Movement, which Cuba chaired from 1979 to 1983, provided the multilateral diplomatic framework within which Cuba sustained its African relations independent of superpower blocs. Additionally Cuban intellectuals worked closely with African and Third world intellectuals calling for the cancellation of the debt to the IMF.

X. Post-Cold War Continuity and the Contemporary Conjuncture

The collapse of the Soviet Union and Cuba's brutal "Special Period" (1990s) forced a dramatic contraction of military and civil commitments, but Cuba maintained its African medical presence even through acute domestic scarcity — a fact widely noted as remarkable by African leaders. The 2026 Cuban crisis — in which the US oil blockade following the Venezuela intervention threatens the collapse of Cuba's energy and food systems — has drawn powerful expressions of African solidarity. The African Union's February 2025 assembly reiterated its call for lifting US sanctions on Cuba. The UN General Assembly representative of Guinea-Bissau, speaking for the African Group, cited "the historical ties of solidarity" and "Cuba's contribution to the decolonization of the continent and the advancement of health and education" as the basis for continued African defense of Cuban sovereignty.

The crisis, and the solidarity it has generated completes a circuit: Cuba bled for African liberation when it had almost nothing; Africa now stands with Cuba when the US seeks to strangle it into submission. That relationship — forged in blood at Cuito Cuanavale, in medicine in the guerrilla zones of Guinea-Bissau, in culture across the Black Atlantic — is among the most consequential expressions of South-South solidarity in the modern world.

Concluding Thoughts: The Break and the New Direction

The debt that global Africa owes Cuba cannot be quantified in monetary terms. States such as Angola, Algeria, Namibia, and South Africa could do far more to oppose the United States campaign to strangle Cuba, but these efforts cannot bear fruit until the popular anti-imperialist forces deepen their understanding of the history of the liberation struggles and the concrete sacrifices that made African independence possible. This commentary has sought to outline that debt while underlining the profoundly interconnected nature of the relationship between Cuba and Africa across more than six decades of shared struggle.

The Cuban Revolution demonstrated how a localized commitment to self-determination and anti-imperialism, rooted in a small island nation, could generate a feedback loop that disrupted the global architecture of imperialist arrogance and white supremacy far beyond its own borders. When Nelson Mandela described Cuito Cuanavale as a turning point, he was naming what complexity theorists would call a bifurcation, a moment when a system under accumulated pressure reaches a threshold beyond which the old order can no longer reproduce itself. Before Cuito Cuanavale, the system was trending toward a permanent steady state of apartheid military domination and destruction.

After the battle, the cost of maintaining that order through war, sanctions, and internal repression exceeded the cost of its collapse. The Cuban intervention acted as the decisive catalyst, lowering the threshold required for the South African alteration to succeed and liberating the energies of an entire continent. Amílcar Cabral argued that liberation required not only armed struggle but also independent thought, insisting that movements must free their minds from imported ideologies and instead analyze their own realities in order to create an authentic, self-determined path forward. The current struggles in all of Africa are bound up with the struggles against global apartheid that now seeks to expand apartheid conditions in Palestine.

The lessons of Cuito Cuanavale do not end with the formal dissolution of apartheid. The wars of militarism and destabilization that ravaged Southern Africa demonstrated that political independence without economic transformation and health sovereignty remains incomplete. Throughout Africa today, popular democratic struggles have radicalized the understanding of democracy far beyond the procedural questions of elections, generating new values and new visions of collective life rooted in the traditions of Ubuntu and radical Pan-African solidarity. The questions of health, dignity, and economic transformation are now more urgent than ever, and they demand the same quality of commitment that Cuba brought to the battlefields of Angola.

Ultimately, the legacies of Cuito Cuanavale and the Cuban engagement with Africa returns us to the most fundamental question of all: the struggle for human dignity. The end of apartheid was not merely a regional victory. It was a rupture in the recursive logic of white supremacy that had organized the world for five centuries, and it announced the possibility of a genuinely new direction for humanity. It is this struggle for universal dignity, grounded in the revolutionary internationalism of Cuba and the liberation traditions of Africa, that constitutes the living content of what a new concept of world revolution must mean. These challenges call upon scholars, intellectuals, and activists to gird themselves for the current struggles against fascism, imperial war, and the forces that seek to restore what Cuito Cuanavale helped to destroy. At this critical moment, genuine solidarity with the Cuban people must take the form of concrete material, political, diplomatic, and financial support.

Horace G. Campbell is a peace and social Justice activist. He is also Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University and Chairperson of the Global Pan African Movement, North American Chapter. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.

Endnotes

[1] Quoted in Ronnie Kasrils, “Cuito Cuanavale, Angola: 25th Anniversary of a Historic African Battle, Monthly Review, Vol 64, No 11, April 2013

[2] Chester Crocker, High noon in southern Africa: making peace in a rough neighborhood, WW Norton, New York, 1992 and Herman J. Cohen, US Policy Toward Africa: Four Decades of Realpolitik, Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2020, Herman J. Cohen, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000

[3] Ronnie Kasrils, op cit, The earliest historical use of the formulation was from, Isaac Saney “African Stalingrad: The Cuban Revolution, Internationalism, and the End of Apartheid” in Latin American Perspectives (Vol. 33, No. 5, September 2006)

[4] Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, How Far We Slaves Have Come! South Africa and Cuba in Today's World, Pathfinder Press, New York 2009

[5] Gleijeses, P. (1996). Cuba's first venture in Africa: Algeria, 1961–1965. Journal of Latin American Studies, 28(1), 159–195.

[6] Amrit Wilson, The Threat of Liberation: Imperialism and Revolution in Zanzibar, Pluto Press, London 2013

[7] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, Harper Collins, New York, 2015. See also Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, St Martins Press, 2014

[8] Karim, K. (1992). The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press

[9] Dreke, V. (2002). From the Escambray to the Congo: In the whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution (M. A. Waters, Ed.). New York: Pathfinder Press

[10] Front for the Liberation of Mozambique

[11] The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Portuguese: Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC)

[12] Aquino de Bragança & Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The African Liberation Reader: The National Liberation Movements, Zed Press, 1982.

[13] Amílcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” address delivered at the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Havana, January 1966. Reproduced in Amílcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, Monthly Review Press, 1969.

[14] John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, W.W.Norton, New York 1984.

[15] Daniel Spikes, Angola and the Politics of Intervention: From Local Bush War to Chronic Crisis in Southern Africa, McFarland Publishing 1993

[16] National Union for the Total Independence of Angola

[17] People's Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (FAPLA), the armed wing of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

[18] Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991

[19] For two different versions see Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Chester Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood, W.W. Norton, New York, 1992.

[20] Hernandez Caceres “The US Biological and Chemical Aggression Against Cuba in 1963–1996,” Journal of NBC Protection Corps

[21] Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday, New York, 2007, pp 360-361

[22] Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe 1964–1981 (London: John Murray, 1987

[23] Gould, C., & Folb, P. I. (2002). Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme. United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). Geneva: United Nations.

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