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Vol. 79/No. 43 November 30, 2015
(front page)
Celebrations mark Cuba’s role in defense of Angola
BY SETH GALINSKY
Forty years ago, revolutionary Cuba began “Operation Carlota,”
defending newly independent Angola from an invasion by the
white-supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa.
The internationalist mission — Cuba’s largest ever, lasting 16 years and
involving 425,000 Cuban volunteers — changed the history of Africa, Cuba
and the world. Its legacy haunts U.S. imperialism to this day.
At the request of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
(MPLA), Cuba in 1965 began providing instructors and training for the
Angolan guerrillas, who were fighting for independence from Portuguese
colonial rule.
“After the triumph of the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal [in April
1974], the country’s entire colonial empire was dismantled,” noted Cuban
Gen. Álvaro López Miera in a Nov. 11 speech in Havana commemorating the
40th anniversary of Angolan independence. “The U.S. government, together
with the racist regime in South Africa, sought to derail independence
and impose a puppet government that would assure the continuation of
imperialist interests.”
By mid-October 1975 troops and mercenaries had invaded from Zaire [now
the Democratic Republic of Congo] in the north and South Africa in the
south. At the request of Agostinho Neto, leader of the MPLA, the Cuban
government sent military instructors to train the Angolan forces.
On Nov. 2 a group of instructors and their students faced an attack by
the invading forces in Benguela. Eight instructors and dozens of
inexperienced Angola youth lost their lives.
Neto asked for Cuban aid. Without a moment’s hesitation, Cuba’s
revolutionary leadership agreed. By Nov. 4 the first of 36,000 Cuban
volunteer soldiers were on their way. López, today chief of the general
staff of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, was among them. By Nov. 14
the South African troops were forced to retreat 620 miles.
“Operation Carlota” had begun. Then Defense Minister Raúl Castro chose
the name to honor “an exceptional African woman, a slave in Cuba who led
two rebellions against colonial oppression,” López said. “Captured after
the second attempt [which began Nov. 5, 1843], she was drawn and
quartered, just what the imperialists intended to do with Angola in 1975.”
Although the apartheid army was pushed back, the South African
government and Washington had not given up hope of violently overturning
the new government in Angola.
The internationalist volunteers — led by Cuban President Fidel Castro,
who sometimes stayed round the clock in the command center in Cuba —
“were decisive in bringing fundamental change to the history of southern
Africa,” López said.
By March 1988 Cuban and Angolan troops defeated South Africa’s last
attempt to turn back history at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The
victory not only secured Angola’s sovereignty, but forced the South
African regime to concede independence to Namibia and gave a tremendous
boost to the revolutionary struggle to end apartheid.
The mission also had a profound impact in Cuba.
Numerous articles in the Cuban press, and this year’s commemorations,
are aimed at keeping alive and inspiring new generations in Cuba with
this internationalist spirit.
An article titled “The Most Just, Prolonged, Massive and Successful
International Military Campaign of Our Country” in the Nov. 5 issue of
Granma notes that even now it’s almost impossible to find a household in
Cuba that doesn’t have a family member or friend who had served in Angola.
Three of the Cuban Five — René González, Fernando González and Gerardo
Hernández — were part of Operation Carlota. The Five are revolutionaries
who were arrested, framed up and jailed in the United States in 1998.
The last of them returned home in a victory for the Cuban Revolution
last December.
“We will always keep in a special part of our hearts the pride of having
participated in the freedom fight on the African continent,” Hernández
said at a Nov. 5 commemoration at the Triunvirato sugar refinery,
Matanzas province, where the slave uprising led by Carlota began in 1843.
‘Our moral high ground’
CubaDebate website published an article Nov. 5 by Operation Carlota
veteran Ventura Carballido Pupo.
“I didn’t have any money in my pockets,” Carballido wrote about their
return to Cuba, “because we were not mercenaries who went to war to risk
our lives for money.”
“Our greatest wealth was the moral high ground, patriotism and the
satisfaction of having done our duty to Fidel and the Party,” he added.
“Without fondness for anything material, everything was happiness. Our
greatest sadness was that not all of us returned alive.”
According to Granma, 2,016 Cubans died in Angola during the mission.
“Few times in history, has a war — the most terrible, heartrending and
difficult action by humans — been accompanied by such a high degree of
humanism and modesty by the victors,” Fidel Castro said in December 2005.
In his speech in Havana, López highlighted Cuba’s ongoing collaboration
with Angola. Some 3,500 Cuban volunteers are working in Angola today in
health, education, sports and construction. Cuban and Angolan volunteers
have taught almost 1 million people there to read and write. And Cuba’s
“Operation Miracle” has treated 600,000 patients and performed nearly
34,000 eye surgeries there. More than 2,000 Angolans are currently
studying in Cuba, he said.
“The imperialists will never understand that we didn’t go to Angola to
pursue material interests,” the Cuban general said. “We did it to pay
our debt with the history of our brothers of African nations, blood
brothers who fought for our independence, and with their sweat and blood
helped forge and develop the wealth of our country.”
Related articles:
Cuban leader: ‘Help fight to lift US embargo’
UK court tells gov’t: ‘Give visa to René González’
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