[News] Cuba’s Operation Carlota 40 Years Later

[Anti-Imperialist News]

November 5, 2015


  Cuba’s Operation Carlota 40 Years Later
  <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/05/cubas-operation-carlota-40-years-later/>

by Matt Peppe <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/matt-peppe/>

*http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/05/cubas-operation-carlota-40-years-later/*

After 40 years, Republic of Guinea native Alpha Diallo still remembers 
the emotion he felt as a 20-year-old college student in Cuba when he 
made a decision that would change his life. The Cuban government had 
just decided to send troops to Angola to fight the invading South 
African army, which had crossed the border into Angola several weeks 
earlier on Oct. 23, 1975. Diallo, who had come from western Africa to 
Havana on scholarship two years earlier to study agricultural 
engineering, attended a rally of 800,000 people in the Plaza of the 
Revolution as Fidel Castro announced the military mission to support the 
anti-colonial Angolan movement and fight apartheid.

“I followed Fidel’s speech and it was compelling. Among the Guineans, 15 
of us decided to give up our studies to go fight,” Diallo recalled 
recently in a phone interview from his home in Washington D.C. “We were 
so impressed and we were excited to go.”

Diallo said that as Africans, he and the other students felt a special 
obligation to help the Cubans fight for the liberation of other African 
countries. Since the early 1960s, Cuba had provided crucial support to 
movements throughout Africa seeking to free themselves from colonialism.

In Guinea-Bissau, Cuba had provided military instructors and doctors, 
enabling the rebels to gain their independence from Portugal two years 
earlier. After the Portuguese dictatorship fell in 1974 and Portugal 
prepared to grant Angola independence on Nov. 11, 1975, three local 
movements fought to take power.

The largest rebel group with the most popular support was the People’s 
Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). They had gained a decisive 
advantage internally and were poised to take control of the government. 
The MPLA was providing critical training and safe haven to other 
anti-colonial rebel groups opposed to minority rule from neighboring 
countries such as (Nelson Mandela’s) ANC of South Africa, SWAPO of 
Namibia, and FRELIMO of Mozambique.

By early November, the South African Defence Force (SADF) was advancing 
45 miles per day toward the capital Luanda. South Africa’s invasion 
jeopardized not only Angola’s revolution, but the struggle for 
liberation throughout the continent. The racists were set to install a 
puppet regime led by former Portuguese collaborator Jonas Savimbi that 
would be amendable to white rule in South Africa and willing to work 
with apartheid to crush the liberation movements. The situation in 
Angola was bleak.

“The MPLA leaders, who had been prepared for a guerilla struggle rather 
than a full-scale war, then understood that only an urgent appeal for 
international solidarity would enable them to rout this concerted attack 
by neighboring states, supported by the most rapacious and destructive 
resources of imperialism,” wrote Colombian author Gabriel García Marquez 
in 1977.

The Angolans had only one unlikely country they could turn to: Cuba. The 
poor Caribbean country, suffering under a vicious economic war waged on 
them for 15 years by the world’s most dominant superpower, had already 
provided military instructors to assist the MPLA. But they would not be 
nearly enough on their own. MPLA leader Agostinho Neto would appeal to 
Fidel Castro on Nov. 3 for reinforcements to ward off the racists.

The answer came less than 48 hours later on Nov. 5. Yes. “The Communist 
Party of Cuba reached its decision without wavering,” García Marquez 
wrote. He noted the date had historical significance for Cubans: “On 
another such November 5, in 1843, a slave called Black Carlota, working 
on the Triunvirato plantation in the Matanzas region, had taken up her 
machete at the head of a slave rebellion in which she lost her life. It 
was in homage to her that the solidarity action in Angola bore her name: 
Operation Carlota.”

On Nov. 7, the first 82 soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes and 
carrying light artillery, set off on a Cubana Airlines flight to Luanda. 
Over the coming weeks and months, Cuban troops would pour into Angola by 
air and by sea. By the end of the year, they would number nearly 10,000 
. More than a decade later, before the end of apartheid, there would be 
as many as 36,000 troops throughout the country.

Fidel Castro, Commander of the Cuban Revolution, would immerse himself 
in the battle.

“There was not a single dot on the map of Angola that he was unable to 
identify, nor any feature of the land that he did not know by heart. His 
absorption in the war was so intense and meticulous that he could quote 
any statistic relating to Angola as if it were Cuba itself, and he spoke 
of its towns, customs and peoples as if he had lived there all his 
life,” writes García Marquez. “In the early stages of the war, when the 
situation was urgent, Fidel Castro would spend up to fourteen hours at a 
stretch in the command room of the general staff, at times without 
eating or sleeping, as if he were on the battlefield himself. He 
followed the course of battles with pins on minutely detailed wall-sized 
maps, keeping in constant touch with the MPLA high command on a 
battlefield where the time was six hours later.”

After landing in Angola, Cuban troops went straight to the battlefield 
and proved decisive in keeping the racist South Africans at bay. On Nov. 
10, Cuban troops ambushed the SADF’s Zulu column, inflicting heavy 
casualties on the apartheid army.

At the Battle of Ebo on Nov. 23, Cuban soldiers attacked the Zulu column 
as it approached a bridge, according to historian Piero Gleijeses. They 
killed and wounded as many as 90 racist troops and knocked out seven or 
eight armored cars. The victory bought Cuba time as reinforcements 
poured in, and Angola received a shipment of weapons from the Soviet 
Union. The apartheid army tried to advance, but were pushed back by 
heavy resistance. By Dec. 27, they were ordered to fall back.

“As 1975 came to a close, the tide had turned against Washington and 
Pretoria. It had turned on the battlefield, where the Cubans had stopped 
the South African advance, and it had turned on the propaganda front: 
the Western press had noticed that South Africa had invaded Angola,” 
writes Gleijeses in Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 
1959-1976. [1]

*Imperialism and Apartheid Conspire Against African Self-Determination*

South Africa had tried to disguise its involvement in the invasion of 
Angola by pretending that mercenaries, rather than the regular South 
African army, had invaded. The Americans, meanwhile, tried to distance 
themselves by claiming they had no involvement in South Africa’s 
military operation. But it is clear from the documentary record that 
Washington’s fingerprints were all over South Africa’s actions.

In a June 1975 meeting of the National Security Council, Secretary of 
State Henry Kissinger told President President Ford he was not “in wild 
agreement” with the options presented by an interagency task force: “The 
first is neutrality – stay out and let nature take its course… As for 
the second course, my Department agrees, but I don’t. It is recommended 
that we launch a diplomatic offensive … and encourage cooperation among 
the groups.” The absence of American intervention, Kissinger admitted, 
would lead to a victory for the MPLA and for Neto to “gradually gain the 
support of other Africans.” [2]

Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger offered: “We might wish to 
encourage the disintegration of Angola. Cabinda in the clutches of 
(Congolese military dictator) Mobutu would mean far greater security of 
the petroleum resources.” Ford was in agreement that the United States 
must prevent Angolan self-determination: “It seems to me that doing 
nothing is unacceptable.” [3]

The most damning evidence, though, was admitted publicly by apartheid 
South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha in the House of Assembly in 
1978. Botha declared that when the SADF invaded Angola: “we did so with 
the approval and knowledge of the Americans.” [4]

By the end of 1975, Cuban troops had routed the apartheid army and 
prevented their takeover of the country. There is no doubt that had 
Castro and the Cuban government declined to confront the apartheid 
regime on the battlefield, the MPLA would have fallen. A South African 
victory would have solidified apartheid and devastated the 
decolonization movements across southern Africa.

“Without the Cuban intervention, the South Africans would have seized 
Luanda before anyone reported that they had crossed the border. The CIA 
covert operation in Angola would have succeeded,” Gleijeses writes. [5]

Diallo and his fellow countrymen in Cuba would not, in the end, join the 
fight against apartheid. When the Cuban government found out that the 
African students wished to take part in the military mission, they 
informed them through the university that they should stay in Cuba.

Even though he had never been to South Africa, Diallo said he understood 
the injustices black South Africans faced under the apartheid system. “I 
was aware of that, the humiliation of people telling you that you 
weren’t as good, telling you where you could live and restricting your 
ability to move around,” he said. Ridding Africa of apartheid, what 
Castro himself called “the most beautiful cause,” was worth fighting 
for. [6]

But Diallo is glad the Cubans made it clear that the students should 
serve in a civic capacity, rather than a military one. “They told us: 
‘Your country needs you. We appreciate your offer, but let us handle 
this. Stay here and finish your studies and then go back and help your 
own countries,’ ” Diallo said.

*References*

[1] Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and 
Africa, 1959-1976. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Kindle 
edition.

[2] June 27, 1975, NSC Minutes, “Angola” (Document obtained from Gerald 
Ford Library, NSC Meetings File, Box 2) 
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB67/gleijeses6.pdf (pg. 3-4)

[3] Ibid. (pg. 7)

[4] as quoted in Gleijeses, 2002

[5] Gleijeses, op. cit.

[6] Instructions to the Cuban Delegation for the London Meeting, 
‘Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la actuación 
de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones de Luanda y las 
negociaciones de Londres (23-4-88)’,” April 23, 1988, History and Public 
Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of the Cuban Armed Forces. 
Obtained and contributed to CWIHP by Piero Gleijeses and included in 
CWIHP e-Dossier No. 44. 
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118134 (pg. 5)

/*Matt Peppe *writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin 
America on his blog <http://mattpeppe.blogspot.com/>. You can follow him 
on twitter <https://twitter.com/PeppeMatt>./

-- 
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