Cuba and Apartheid

Adrien Delmas

To what extent was Cuba responsible for the fall of apartheid? This essay
will neither try to determine the complex chain of events that brought
about the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, nor to rehearse the role
of Cuban military engagement in Angola from 1975 in this narrative.
Instead, it presents two connected questions: in what name did Cuba
become engaged in Angola, and how does this help us understand the
global context of anti-apartheid? To tackle these questions, one could
almost ignore the outcome of the conflict itself and focus directly on the
principal motivations for Cuba to send up to 50,000 soldiers to fight in
southern Africa from 1975 to 1991. As idealistic as it may seem, it was
first and foremost in the name of non-racialism that the Cuban regime
sent its army to intervene irreversibly in the history of southern Africa.
As such, this chapter is not a political, diplomatic or military history of
the Cuban intervention in Africa. Besides the need to complete such a
narrative adding the South African views, it is rather a contribution to
the cultural history of the concept of apartheid. Based on discursive anal-
ysis of the references made to the segregationist regime from the other
side of the Atlantic, this contribution aims at rescaling the international
dimension of a concept still far too national in tone. As a matter of fact,
it was in the name of apartheid, or rather against its name, that Cuba

A. Delmas (*) 
Institut Des Mondes Africains, CNRS UMR 8171, Paris, France

© The Author(s) 2019 133

A. Konieczna and R. Skinner (eds.), A Global History of Anti-Apartheid,
St Antony's Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03652-2_5
134  A. DELMAS

became engaged on the soil of southern Africa—military engaged, unlike

the majority of anti-apartheid movements around the world. As such,
a slightly different history of non-racialism emerges from the war in
Angola, a history no longer opposing two antagonistic models (mestizaje
vs. apartheid) but instead, through a number of reciprocal cultural refer-
ences, delineating a common history.

Echoes from Cuito Cuanavale

In the aftermath of the 1959 revolution, Cuba was quick to establish its
anti-colonial commitments.1 These first materialized with the dispatch
of troops and materiel to Algeria. Contacts with liberation movements
had been made before, but in October 1963 nearly 600 soldiers and 20
tanks were sent to repulse the Moroccan invasion that took place in the
wake of Algerian independence. In 1965, although only cautiously wel-
comed by African liberation movements, Che Guevara set about estab-
lishing a guerrilla madre in eastern Congo, assisting the future President
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Laurent Kabila. The oper-
ation ended in failure and the Cuban soldiers were forced to withdraw
in October 1965. In January the following year, the first tricontinen-
tal conference took place in Havana. On this occasion, it was decided
to offer support to the struggles against Portuguese colonialism led by
Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau and Agostinho Neto in Angola. But
there was still a long road ahead before Lusophone Africa achieved inde-
pendence. When Fidel Castro visited the continent for the first time in
1972, travelling from Algiers to Conakry, relations with Angola’s social-
ist movements were not yet a priority. Nevertheless, with the signing of
the Alvor Accord on 15 January 1975, which set the date of Angolan
independence for 11 November that year, the logic of confrontation
between liberation movements was in place. The People’s Movement
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Liberation Front of
Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola (UNITA) jockeyed for power, backed by complex yet more or
less assumed coalitions at the international level. After a South African
force—Task Force Zulu—crossed into Angola in support of UNITA,
Havana mounted Operation Carlota in early November 1975. This was
decided without any previous backing from Moscow.2 The operation was
a success and the MPLA was able to declare the birth of the People’s
Republic of Angola in Luanda. Even so, fighting against UNITA and the
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  135

FNLA did not cease—on the contrary—and by January 1976 there were
no less than 3000 Cuban soldiers on Angolan soil. When Castro finally
touched down in Luanda the following year, it was primarily to nego-
tiate the withdrawal of Cuban troops.3 But faced with persistent incur-
sions by South African forces in Angola, as part of the counterinsurgency
effort against the guerrillas of South West Africa People’s Organization
(SWAPO) in South West Africa (Namibia), the Cuban leader decided
to maintain its troops and to request support from Moscow. In 1980,
the independence of Zimbabwe aggravated the confrontation. Over
the years, the military operations of Pretoria, Washington, Moscow and
Havana multiplied, transforming Angola—and southern Africa more
broadly—into one of the Cold War’s theatres of direct confrontation.
The conflict became the most deadly one on the African continent since
the Second World War, with more than 25,000 deaths. It reached its
high point during the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, from 1987, involving
no less than 55,000 combatants. Orchestrated by the United States,
peace negotiations began in May 1988 in London. Despite American
reluctance, Cuba joined the talks after the strengthening of their mili-
tary position. The diplomatic discussions moved to Cairo in June,
New York in July (where agreement was reached on the application of
UN Resolution 435, passed in 1978), then in Geneva in August. The
New York Accords were finally signed on 22 December 1988, linking
the independence of Namibia with the withdrawal of Cuban and South
African troops from the region. Set for 1 July 1989, the final troop with-
drawals took place in June 1991.
Namibia became independent on 21 March 1990, at which point
diplomatic-military histories usually conclude. Should the story be
extended to the liberation of Nelson Mandela, on 11 February 1990,
his election as President of South Africa in April 1994 and the fall of
apartheid? Although the New York Accords made no demands on South
Africa with respect to internal policy,4 it is clear that, during the negoti-
ations, the question of the future of apartheid was omnipresent. Jorge
Risquet, responsible for Cuban civil and military personnel in Africa,
and of whom each participant remembers the odour of his cigar smoke,
explains: ‘as for the withdrawal of the Cubans, we had planned to stay
until the liquidation of apartheid. But the Angolans did not want to take
things that far’.5 In Cairo, where the discussions resumed in June 1988,
attention focused on South African internal policy to a greater extent
than the military future of the region. ‘How many Blacks are there in
136  A. DELMAS

apartheid prisons?’, was the question posed by Cubans to the South

Africans.6 Was the release of Mandela explicitly mentioned? It seems
likely that Cuban leaders would have made the query, but there is no
evidence of specific references to high-profile political detainees.7 Fidel
Castro, who was directly piloting both negotiations and military strategy
from Havana, showed that he was well aware of what was at stake at this
precise moment:

The history of Africa will know a very important moment, we will speak
of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale. Because powerful
South Africa, the whites, the superior race, crashed against a tiny scrap of
territory defended by Blacks and Mulattos. We do not seek a military vic-
tory, but a reasonable, just and acceptable solution. South Africa may lose,
not just Namibia but also apartheid. We want this problem to be resolved
now, and we will be in the antechamber of the solution to the problem of
apartheid.8

Piero Gleijeses, who has had access to the minutes of the four-party
negotiations, has refrained from pronouncing on the speed of events
between Cuito Cuanavale and the release of Nelson Mandela.9 The
link is certainly not direct, between the Cuban military presence on the
frontier of Namibia and the decision by South African National Party to
start reforms and resume a dialogue with its former enemies—primarily
the African National Congress (ANC). From the New York Accords of
December 1988 to F.W. Klerk’s speech to Parliament in Cape Town in
February 1990, through the independence of Namibia, the year 1989
must be regarded as decisive. At the very least, an examination of the
Angolan war, which brought three continents into confrontation, sug-
gests that South Africa’s democratic transition was a process that by no
means involved South Africa exclusively.

Apartheid as the Cuban Target in Angola

In the wake of the liberation of Namibia and South Africa, the link
between Cuban military intervention in Angola and the fall of apartheid
was made explicit by the iconic figure of Nelson Mandela, who chose
Cuba for his first foreign visit following his release. During a great rally
at Matanzas in July 1991, he declared to the large crowd:
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  137

The crushing defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale was a victory
for the whole Africa! The overwhelming defeat of the racist army at Cuito
Cuanavale provided the possibility for Angola to enjoy peace and consoli-
date its own sovereignty! The defeat of the racist army allowed the strug-
gling people of Namibia to finally win their independence! The decisive
defeat of the apartheid aggressors broke the myth of the invincibility of
the white oppressors! The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration
to the struggling people inside South Africa! Without the defeat of Cuito
Cuanavale our organizations would not have been unbanned! The defeat
of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be
here today! Cuito Cuanavale was a milestone in the history of the struggle
for southern African liberation! Cuito Cuanavale has been a turning point
in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of
apartheid!10

If it is not possible to confirm or challenge Mandela’s conclusions

in military terms, it seems fair to conclude that the real target of the
Cuban military engagement in Angola between 1975 and 1991 was in
fact South Africa—more than the independence of Namibia or support
for the MPLA. There is no doubt that the Cuban target was apartheid,
because it was claimed and repeated not only from the time the military
balance began to swing, at the end of the 1980s, but from the very start
of the Cuban internationalist endeavour. On the occasion of the collec-
tive burial of Cuban soldiers killed in Angola in Cuba on 7 December
1989, Castro sought consolation in the imminent fall of apartheid. It is
said that more than 2000 Cubans were killed in Africa11:

These men and women whom we are laying to rest today in the land of
their birth gave their lives for the most treasured values of our history and
our revolution. They died fighting against colonialism and neo-colonial-
ism. They died fighting against racism and apartheid.12

With the destiny of the regime in Pretoria seemingly sealed at this

date, such a reading could be considered as justification a posteriori
of Cuban intrusion. But this objective had already been proclaimed at
a more uncertain time, when the decision was taken to send addi-
tional troops in the lead up to the engagements at Cuito Canavale.
On 5 December 1987, during a rally in Havana, Castro’s public state-
ment assumed a pedagogical tone:
138  A. DELMAS

All of Africa deeply hates apartheid. All of Africa views apartheid as their
greatest enemy, an enemy that despises Africa, attacks Africa, humiliates
Africa. It is incredible up to what point the African people suffer from
apartheid, and this has turned African feelings, the African soul, into an
ally of Cuba.13

But, the link between the presence of Cuban troops on African soil
and the will to fight apartheid was actually made much earlier. In 1975,
Castro explained to volunteer soldiers and their families14:

Africa still has very serious problems. In time they’ll have to deal with the
question of racism, of South Africa, which is one of the biggest problems
the continent has. The two great problems were Portuguese colonialism
and the racism in South Africa, where a few million keep fourteen million
Africans oppressed. For all the peoples of Africa, South Africa is a problem
that touches the most sensitive nerve.15

In fact, apartheid was in the Cuban revolutionary’s sights from the

very moment Castro took power, or thereabouts, well before there was
any question of influencing directly the balance of power in southern
Africa by military intervention. As such, the anti-apartheid discourse
given to Cuban soldiers in 1975 on the eve of their transatlantic cross-
ing echoes the long-standing Cuban view on African geopolitics, made
to allies and enemies alike in the international diplomatic arena. Its gene-
alogy goes back at least to Che Guevara’s intervention before the United
Nations (UN), in 1964, with the Cuban revolution barely achieved:

Once again we speak out to alert the world to what is happening in South
Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is being applied before the eyes of
the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure
the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over
another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superior-
ity murder is committed with impunity.16

While India had begun the wave of denunciation of apartheid inter-

nationally, in the same forum in the late 1940s,17 Cuba lost no time not
only in following in their footsteps, as soon as the opportunity arose,
but also in taking the battle to new terrain, that of armed intervention,
in order to make the anti-Pretoria front its causa más bonita (the most
beautiful cause).
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  139

‘El Problema Más Difícil De La Revolución’

In what name did Cuba deploy such a total engagement against apart-
heid, a military engagement, unlike the majority of anti-apartheid move-
ments worldwide?18 Some elements emerge readily, such as the struggle
against imperialism or internationalism, two driving forces at the heart of
this engagement:

Cuba is in Angola by virtue of internationalist principles, by virtue of its

feelings of solidarity, because it is doing its duty of helping other peoples.
It is doing its duty of helping the African peoples against apartheid, against
racism, against colonialism, against foreign aggression.19

Nelson Mandela would hasten, moreover, to offer a warm tribute to

this solidarity, on the occasion of his first visit in 1991, considering that it
had no parallel in the history of the twentieth century:

We have long wanted to visit your country and express the many feelings
that we have about the Cuban revolution, about the role of Cuba in Africa,
southern Africa, and the world. The Cuban people hold a special place in
the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made
a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled
and selfless in character.20

In other words, this engagement was directly set in motion by politi-

cal idealism, an idealism that Piero Gleijeses also cites as an explanation:
‘I do not know of any other country, in modern times, for which ideal-
ism has been such a key component of its foreign policy as for Castro’s
Cuba’.21
This idealism was mainly built on one single principle. As the early
Che Guevara indictment against apartheid at the UN tribune suggested,
Cuban military engagement from 1975 had its roots in forceful denun-
ciation of the racism of the South African regime. As a political, social
and cultural question, the ‘racial question’ first became an imperative of
the domestic political agenda of the Cuban revolutionaries, so much so
as to become, immediately after power had been achieved, ‘el problema
más difícil de la revolución’ (the most difficult problem of the revolu-
tion). The same question took Cuba beyond its territory and beyond
oceans.
140  A. DELMAS

On the domestic level, the revolutionaries of 1959 were in a hurry

to decree the end of institutional segregation and cultural racism, which,
in their view, was undermining Cuban society. Such a ‘decree’, aimed
at ending racism in the island, might not have had the expected results.
Certain scholars, such as Carlos Moore, have explored the question of
racism in Cuba with as much insight as anger,22 seeing in the decree to
deracialize Cuban society nothing more than, at best, instrumentaliza-
tion, manipulation and paternalism, and at worst hypocrisy. Others, such
as Alejandro de la Fuente or Pablo Rodríguez Ruíz, have seen it as a
national ideology not always conscious of its own limits.23
What is certain is that the racial question was never imposed on the
Cuban agenda as an exclusively national question. Indeed, it became also
the lodestone of foreign policy, very quickly, even immediately. Internal
policy and foreign policy were the two sides of the same coin: how to
make a post-racial revolution?24 Because if, domestically, this concern,
itself guided by social Marxism, pointed to the too rapid, even naïve
decree of the end of racial discrimination, this is even more evident at
the international level. A systematic account of this complex interweav-
ing of internal social questions and international geopolitics is still to be
written, but it would have to include the story of the Cuban delegation’s
first visit to the UN, in 1960. In brief, Washington, still surprised by the
success of a social (and soon socialist) revolution right on their doorstep,
had decided to accommodate the delegation in Harlem, far from the
other delegations. But the Cubans and their anti-racial discourse, held in
the heart of American segregation, soon became uncontrollable.25 This
unexpected success is clear in the support of the leaders of the civil rights
movement. Robert F. Williams, for example, even asked the Cubans to
land with their army in the Southern United States, as they would a few
years later in Africa, and to start post-racial revolutions all over the world:

Today, thanks to a social revolution which they helped make, Afro-Cubans

are first-class citizens of their country where all racial barriers crumbled in
a matter of weeks following the victory of Fidel Castro … Afro-Americans,
don’t be fooled – the enemies of the Cubans are our enemies, the Cubans
are our friends, the enemies of our enemies.26

The racial question, and the anti-racial position taken by the young
Cuban regime, thus appeared as an unparalleled diplomatic weapon.
It allowed them to attack the US both on their own turf and on the
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  141

international political stage. In addition, it differentiated the small

Caribbean island from both Soviet and Chinese communism, both of
which seemed did not manage to formulate such a clear post-colonial
aspiration.27 But, above all, it allowed Cuba to project itself beyond its
coasts, with a foreign policy oriented towards Algeria, Lusophone Africa,
Ethiopia and, above all, South Africa, soon identified as the enemy by defi-
nition. As early as 1960, Cuba had made the link between ‘the hyenas of
apartheid and the jackals of the Ku Klux Klan’.28

Shared Genealogies
Why did Cuba send two-thirds of its army to the other side of the
Atlantic? Broadly, the intervention was motivated by anti-imperial-
ism, internationalism, and first and foremost non-racialism. But such a
non-racialist endeavour, as pragmatic as it was with unique and ambitious
geopolitical strategy, had to be supported by a narrative. Reading the
speeches that sent tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers to fight on the
other side of the Atlantic, this engagement emerged with a new contem-
plation of Cuban and Atlantic history. First of all, it was launched in (or
against) the name of recent history. Thus, on the eve of his accession to
power, Fidel Castro offered a rereading of Cuban history that tended to
qualify the Batista regime as a ‘Cuban apartheid’.29 A great number of
public places were, indeed, legally reserved for the white elites: beaches,
public parks, social clubs, hotels and restaurants. Equally, it was Castro
who, in the name of anti-communitarianism, closed certain jazz clubs or
other exclusively Afro-Cuban places.30 And that ‘Cuban apartheid’ which
had been dismantled in the Caribbean should be, and could be, disman-
tled elsewhere.
If South African apartheid allowed Castro to understand the recent
past of his country, it was also necessary to produce a new history of the
island, an inverted history, a kind of Cuban counter-history of apartheid.
This narrative would begin with the history of slavery,31 from that point
assumed, claimed, even mobilized, because it allowed Cuba to be linked
to Angola, and America to Africa. ‘In keeping with the duties rooted in
our principles, our ideology, our convictions and our very own blood, we
shall defend Angola and Africa’,32 remarked the caudillo in 1975. This
argument, of blood as history, and of duty imposed by history, does not
seem to have discomfited Mandela in the slightest. In celebrating this
engagement in 1991, he expressed how moved he was by such a decree
142  A. DELMAS

of the shared history of Africa and America: ‘in particular we are moved
by your affirmation of the historical connection to the continent and
people of Africa’.33 The Cuban regime would proudly bring a new his-
torical narrative and inscribe its action in the genealogy of slave revolts,
back to the eighteenth century or even before. Thus, the first military
operation in Angola was named ‘Carlota’, after the slave who led a revolt
in the province of Matanzas in 1843. At one point, the history of the
slave trade, resistance to slavery, the socialist revolution and the decolo-
nization of Africa became one and the same. As López Blanch notes:

In our hemisphere, the slaves were the first to rise up in one form or
another against colonial domination from times as early as the 16th cen-
tury itself. Large uprisings in Jamaica, Barbados and other countries took
place during the early 18th century, long before the revolt by the North
American colonies at the end of that century. The first republic in Latin
America was created by the slaves of Haiti. In Cuba, years later, heroic and
massive slave rebellions took place. The slaves of African descent showed
the way to freedom on that continent.34

This is why, even more than in the classic genealogy of American

independence35—that of the creoles against the colony—the Cuban rev-
olution, in its search for non-racialism, placed itself in the ambit of indig-
enous history and slave resistance.36 And to lead the ideological battle
against apartheid, Cuba also disposed of a powerful concept that had
already shaped the independent nations of Latin America, from Mexico
to Brazil: the concept of mestizaje. Thus, the other historic pillar that
would lead to, and justify, Cuban interventionism in Africa, was rooted
in the historical experience of racially cosmopolitan populations in the
New World. This was the exact opposite of the logic of apartheid, as
Mandela described to the crowd in Havana in 1991:

Apartheid is not something that started yesterday. The origins of white rac-
ist domination go back three and a half centuries to the moment when
the first white settlers started a process of disruption and later conquest of
the Khoi, San, and other African peoples – the original inhabitants of our
country.37

Apartheid represented, then, the opposite of the imagined Caribbean,

where ‘to be Cuban is more than being White, more than being Black’,38
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  143

an idea and ideal that the Castro revolution borrowed from the work of
the late nineteenth-century poet and father of Cuban independence, José
Martí. The American experience of cultural mixing, which shaped the
national discourse of the states of Latin America and the Caribbean, from
the ‘raza cósmica’ (cosmic race) of Mexico to the ‘racial democracy’ of
Brazil, from José Vasconcelos to Gilberto Freyre,39 is the same experi-
ence that gave shape to Cuban foreign policy and to its military engage-
ment in southern Africa:

There is no hate of races, because there are not any races. The weak think-
ers, the house thinkers, thread and reheat the races of libraries, which
the fair traveller and cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of nature,
where lies, in victorious love and turbulent appetite, the universal identity
of the man.40

Martí’s vindictive words may be found as an epigraph in the well-

known book by Fernando Ortíz, El engaño de las razas, in which the
latter proposed to put an end, thanks to the Cuban experience, to cen-
turies of pseudo-scientific constructions on the subject of race. A detailed
genealogy of Cuban non-racialism would notably involve the literature
known as ‘Afro-Cubanism’. The mobilization of Fernando Ortíz or Alejo
Carpentier, among others, after 1959 is yet to be studied in depth, but
it seems clear that it was the discursive basis on which the Castro rev-
olution wished to register its action in Africa.41 Because ‘the Americas,
all of the Americas, is mestizo’42 as Ortíz declared in his preface, Cuba
certainly felt it had the right, and the duty, to send its soldiers to Africa
to fight apartheid. ‘How comes that the superior race army could not
take over Cuito Cuanavale?’43 Castro asked the Russians, ironically and
proudly, in 1988.

Non-racial Atlantic
What does Cuban history tell us about the history of apartheid? The
twentieth century seems to have established diametrically opposed pro-
cesses of national construction between Hispanic America and sub-Sa-
haran Africa—at least as they relate to ‘the racial question’. Haven’t we
become used to reading the two models—mestizaje on the one hand,
apartheid on the other—as incommensurable? This incommensurabil-
ity is first of all linguistic, since no one really tried, as Derrida remarked,
144  A. DELMAS

to translate the term ‘apartheid’ into whatever language it may be.44

In the same way, the term ‘mestizaje’ has never really found its English
equivalent. We must admit that it is simpler to oppose them a pri-
ori than to think of them together. Nevertheless, the history of Cuba’s
political, military, diplomatic and discursive engagement in south-
ern Africa precludes such ready usage. How could we still propose two
distinct accounts? In disentangling the rhetorical stakes of the Cuban
military involvement in Africa, it is very much a common history that
emerges. Such a common history is not only woven by the links and
the continuities drawn by the slave trade, nor the games of transconti-
nental geopolitical alliances, but rather by a common history of racial-
ism and non-racialism in the twentieth century. Of histories that regard
one another, that intermingle, in short, quite the opposite of anything
incommensurable. This history is political, it is military, and it is com-
plex. But it is also common, global, it is made up of distant and different
realities that encounter one another, sometimes on the battlefield, but
first and foremost in the field of references.
All of these crossed references remain to be mapped in order to
redraw a history of non-racialism.45 The Cuban epic in Africa, which was
supported by a cultural substrate that is well known but which surprises
us by its internationalist, even universalist, character, will allow us to end
up with national readings that would oppose racialism and non-racialism
or would apply national models torn from their context and projected
phantasmagorically on largely decontextualized realities. The unfortunate
tendency to apply the North American key to the understanding of the
African, European or South American history of racial politics have con-
tributed to hide such a common history.46 Comparisons are also unfortu-
nate, if they presuppose the politics of race as hermetic from each other.
The ‘globality’ of this history, despite recent attempts,47 remains largely
to be tackled, as so many common references must still be catalogued.
Of the Cuban engagement in Africa, one can perhaps look to a largely
unexplored historical geography of the South Atlantic, shaped by com-
mon references to mestizaje and apartheid.48 But as useful as it is to dis-
entangle such a geography, the Cuba-South Africa link is but a short-cut.
It is not only about a link between the Caribbean and southern Africa,
passing largely via Lusophone Africa, but also, and as we have seen,
via the United States, or at least the American South. Significantly, the
fact that it does not pass through Europe, through London, Lisbon or
Moscow, bring us to the question of memory, of a dispersed and elusive
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  145

memory of a history that is nevertheless shared. For want of our being

able to pronounce today on the role of Cuba in the fall of apartheid, to
recover the exact sequence of events that took place in 1989, we must
start by remarking that this history running between Havana, Luanda
and Pretoria allows for the breaking of explanatory models that seek
to explain apartheid by its isolation or exceptionality. This prevents us
definitively from seeking to produce a national history of the concept of
apartheid. Far from being isolated, the apartheid regime, as a reference,
cannot be understood except transnationally. This is the case for its insti-
tutionalization and likewise for its dismantling. This history of the con-
ceptualization of apartheid, which is still to be written, passes through
Cuba, as underlined by Castro, in 1998, in a speech to the Parliament of
the new South Africa: ‘Apartheid, in reality, was universal, and lasted for
centuries’.49

Notes
1. This paragraph is built on Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana,
Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003), and Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington,
Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa 1976–1991 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Edward George, The
Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito
Cuanavale (London: Routledge, 2005); and Christine Hatzky, Cubans in
Angola, South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
2. See Piero Gleijeses, Jorge Risquet, and Fernando Remírez, Cuba y Africa:
Historia común de lucha y sangre (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
2007), 49–56.
3. It is also worth mentioning Cuba’s military engagement with Ethiopian
forces against Somalia during the Ogaden War (1977–1978), which
brought up to 12,000 Cuban soldiers to the Horn of Africa.
4. “Agreement among the People’s Republic of Angola, the Republic
of Cuba, and the Republic of South Africa (Tripartite Agreement)”,
December 22, 1988. The complete text is available at the United Nations
Peacemaker website, accessed August 15, 2016, http://peacemaker.
un.org/angola-tripartite-agreement88.
5. Testimony of Jorge Risquet, in Jihan El-Tahri’s documentary, Cuba: An
African Odyssey (2007) (II, 48’), which continues: ‘But the Angolans did
not want to take things that far. So we proposed finding a global solu-
tion, with total withdrawal.’
146  A. DELMAS

6. Testimony of Ndalu dos Santos in Cuba: An African Odyssey (II, 51’). To

Pik Botha’s unease about the maintenance of a concealed Cuban presence
through marriages contracted locally, Risquet responded by denouncing
Pretoria’s Immorality Act, which banned mixed marriages.
7. The voice off of Jihan El-Tahri’s documentary starts—‘As a sign of good
faith, South Africa is commanded to release its most faithful prisoner,
Nelson Mandela’—without, however, leaning on particular testimony.
8. Testimony of Fidel Castro in Cuba: An African Odyssey (II, 44’). One
assumes this was in at least June or July 1988.
9. While suggesting this conclusion, Piero Gleijeses does not give his opin-
ion completely in the epilogue of his two-volume work: ‘Any fair assess-
ment of Cuba’s foreign policy must recognize its role in changing the
course of southern African history despite Washington’s best effort to
stop it’, Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 526. For a constructive discussion
on his work see H-Net Roundtable on Piero Gleijes, Visions of Freedom:
Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa,
1976–1991, by Chris Saunders and al., accessed August 15, 2016,
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/34846/h-dip-
lo-roundtable-visions-freedom-havana-washington-pretoria-and.
10. Mary-Alice Waters, Cuba & Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and
Our Own (New York: Pathfinder, 2013), 75.
11. See Gleijeses et al., Cuba y Africa, 68. The names of Cuban combat-
ants who fell in Angola are inscribed at Freedom Park, the only foreign-
ers to figure in the South African pantheon inaugurated in 2004 on the
approaches to Pretoria.
12. Waters, Cuba & Angola, 57.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. The question of the volunteers is addressed by Gleijeses in Cuba y Africa,
69, n. 123.
15. Waters, Cuba & Angola, 29.
16. Hedelberto López Blanch, Cuba: pequeño gigante contra el Apartheid
(Havana: Abril, 2008), 25.
17. See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the
Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press,
2009), 149–89.
18. For slightly less Eurocentric histories of the international anti-apartheid
movements, where Cuba perhaps does not hold the position that it came
to, see David Mermelsein, eds., The Anti-Apartheid Reader: The Struggle
against White Racist Rule in South Africa (New York: Grove Press,
1987); Håkan Thörn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global
Civil Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
19. Waters, Cuba & Angola, 49.
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  147

20. Ibid., 73.
21. Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 526.
22. Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1988). Although in many ways a witness for the prosecution,
this book offers valuable testimony and a unique source of information
on the question.
23.  Alejandro de la Fuente, Una Nación para todos: Raza, desigualdad
y política en Cuba, 1900–2000 (Havana: Imagen Contemporanea,
2014); Denia García Ronda, cord., Presencia Negra en Cuba (Havana:
Sensemaya, 2006). The existence of a sociological critique of the polit-
ical discourse on racial questions is not unique to Cuba. We can cite,
for example in France, Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: Essai sur une
minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), or, in Mexico, Federico
Navarrete, México racista, una denuncia (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2013).
24. The great merit of Moore’s book, unlike that of Fuente, is to show the
extent to which the two questions, of internal and external policy, were
posed in a concomitant manner. But once again, his tone is one of
reproach: ‘Havana’s self-proclaimed duty to ‘save Africa’ from imperial-
ism appears to be a subtle transfer onto the black continent of the eth-
no-political strategy Castro had successfully applied to Cuba’s domestic
Africa.’ Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 9. On the transformation
of the racial balance following the intervention in Africa, and for a superb
demonstration of this interweaving, see also Henley C. Adams, “Race and
the Cuban Revolution: The Impact of Cuba’s Intervention in Angola”
(PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999).
25. The best description of this anecdote is to be found in Moore, Castro, the
Blacks and Africa, 78–82.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Gliejeses, Visions of Freedom, 343–78.
28. Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 113.
29. The parallel between the dismantling of segregationist policies in Cuba in
1959 and South Africa in 1994 remains to be examined. Such a paral-
lel should not conceal the fact that both countries shared the same basic
question, which endures today: what is a non-racial, or, more precisely,
a post-racial revolution?
30. Castro: ‘The beaches, once the exclusive privilege of a few, have now been
opened up to the Cuban people regardless of colour, without stupid prej-
udices. I ask the people if they are or if they are not in agreement with
the fact that equal opportunities of employment are open to Cuban of
every colours’. Quoted by Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 58.
31. A relatively late reference to the question of slavery in Cuba.
148  A. DELMAS

32. Fidel Castro, speech given on 22 December 1975. The beginning of the

quotation reads as follows: ‘And today, who are the representatives, the
symbols of the most hateful and inhuman form of racial discrimination?
The South African fascists and racists. And Yankee imperialism, without
scruples of any kind, has launched South African mercenary troops in an
attempt to crush Angola’s independence and is now outraged by our help
to Angola, our support for Africa and our defence of Africa. In keeping
with the duties rooted in our principles, our ideology, our convictions
and our very own blood, we shall defend Angola and Africa.’ Waters,
Cuba & Angola, 31.
33. Ibid., 73. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995).
34. López Blanch, Cuba: pequeño gigante, 30
35. See, among others, François-Xavier Guerra, eds., Mémoires en devenir:
Amérique latine XVIe–XXe siècle (Bordeaux: Maison des Pays Ibériques,
1994).
36. The two, of course, are by no means exclusive. See, for example, José
Bengoa, La emergencia indígena en América Latina (Santiago: FCE,
2000).
37. Waters, Cuba & Angola, 75.
38. Fernando Ortíz, Martí y las razas (Havana: Mundial, 1953).
39. José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica (México: Agencia Munidal de
Librería, 1925); Gilberto Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala (Rio de
Janeiro: Global Editora, 1933). More generally, for a history of the
racial question in Latin America, see Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S.
Macpherson, and Karin A. Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern
Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Richard Graham, eds., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
40. Fernando Ortíz, El engaño de la razas (Havana: Editorial de ciencias
sociales, 1975), 29.
41. See the work of Kali Argyriadis on the history of anthropology in Cuba.
42. Ortíz, El engaño de la razas, 31.
43. Cited by Gleijeses, Cuba & Africa, 63.
44. Derrida has already made the observation; Jacques Derrida, “The Last
Word of Racism,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987),
353–62.
45. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic.
46. Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Pour une histoire politique de la race (Paris: Seuil,
2015).
47. 
See, for example, a critique of the global fight against racism led by
UNESCO, in Robert Bernasconi, eds., Race and Racism in Continental
Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2003).
 CUBA AND APARTHEID  149

48. For a long history and conceptualisation of the South Atlantic, see Luiz
Felipe de Alencastro, O tratado dos vivientes, Formação do Brasil no
Atlântico Sul, séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2000).
49. Lopez Blanch, Cuba: pequeño gigante, 30.

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