THE United State revealed the presence of Cuban troops in Angola for the first time in an official statement in 1975. It was estimated at that time that some 15,000 men had been dispatched there. Three months later, during a brief visit to Caracas, Henry Kissinger said in private to President Carlos Andrés Pérez: "Our information services must have sadly deteriorated given that we didn’t know that the Cubans were going into Angola until they were already there." On that occasion, however, he corrected the total of the men sent by Cuba to only 12,000. Although he never explained the reason for that change of figures, the fact is that neither of the two was correct. At that time there were many Cuban troops and military specialists and civilian technical personnel and more than those Henry Kissinger attempted to suppose. There were so many Cuban vessels at anchor in the bay of Luanda that President Agostinho Neto, counting them from a window, felt a tremor of embarrassment very much in line with his character: "It’s not right," he told an official who was a friend of his, "at this rate Cuba is going to be ruined."

Probably not even the Cubans themselves had foreseen that the solidarity aid to the people of Angola would reach such proportions. What they were clear about from the outset is that the action had to be categorical and rapid, and on no account could it be lost.

The contacts between the Cuban Revolution and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were established for the first time in August 1965 when Che Guevara participated in the Congolese guerrilla movement, and had become very intense. The following year Agostinho Neto was in Cuba, accompanied by Endo, commander in chief of the MPLA who died in the war, and both of them met with Fidel Castro. Then, and due to the very conditions of the struggle in Angola, those contacts became casual. Only in May 1975, when the Portuguese were preparing to withdraw from their African colonies, the Cuban Commander Flavio Bravo met in Brazzaville with Agostinho Neto and the latter asked him for help in transporting a cargo of arms and, moreover, consulted with him as to the possibility of more extensive and specific aid. As a consequence, Commander Raúl Díaz Argüelles moved to Luanda three months later at the head of a delegation of civilian Cubans, and Agostinho Neto was then more precise although no less ambitious: he asked for a group of instructors to found and direct four military training centers.

Even a superficial knowledge of the situation in Angola would be enough to understand that Neto’s petition was likewise typical of his modesty. Although the MPLA, founded in 1956, was the oldest liberation movement in Angola and although it was the only one to have developed with a very broad popular base and offered a social, political and economic program in line with the country’s conditions, it was also the movement that found itself in a less advantageous military situation. It did have some Soviet weaponry, but lacked personnel trained to handle it. On the other hand, the Zairian regular troops, well trained and equipped, had penetrated Angola on March 25 and had proclaimed in Carmona a de facto government headed by Holden Roberto, the FNLA leader and brother-in-law of Mobutu and whose links with the CIA were in the public domain. In the west, under the protection of Zambia, was UNITA, the command of Jonas Savimbi, an unprincipled adventurer who had been in constant cooperation with the Portuguese military and the foreign exploiting companies. Finally, the regular South African forces, via Namibian occupied territory, had crossed the southern border of Angola on August 5, under the pretext of protecting the wells in the Raucana-Calaqua hydroelectric complex.

All those forces with their huge economic and military resources were ready to enclose Luanda within an irresistible circle by the eve of the withdrawal of the Portuguese army from that vast, rich and beautiful territory where it had been happily ensconced for 500 years. So when the Cuban leaders received Neto’s petition, they didn’t comply with his strict terms, but decided to immediately send a contingent of 480 specialists to set up four training centers and organize 16 infantry battalions, and 25 mortar and anti-aircraft machine gun batteries in the space of six months. As a complement, they sent a brigade of doctors, 115 vehicles and a communications team.

That first contingent was transported in three improvised vessels. The Viet Nam Heroíco, a passenger liner, had been bought by the dictator Fulgencio Batista from a Dutch company in 1956 and converted into a training ship. The other two, the Coral Island and La Plata, were urgently fitted out merchant ships. However, the way in which they were loaded is an excellent illustration of the foresight and daring of the Cubans in facing up to the Angola commitment.

It might seem ridiculous that the vehicle fuel should have been brought from Cuba. Angola is an oil-producing country and in this way the Cubans had to take theirs half way round the world from the Soviet Union. However, the Cubans preferred play safe, and on that first voyage transported 1,000 tons in 55-gallon tanks divided among the three boats. The Viet Nam Heroíco took 200 tons in 55-gallon tanks and traveled with the hold open to allow the gases to disperse. La Plata transported gasoline in the prow. The night on which they finished loading them coincided with a popular Cuban fiesta and rockets were let off and there were prodigious firework displays even in the Havana docks, where one spark could have turned those three floating arsenals into ashes. Fidel Castro himself went to see them off, as he did with all the contingents who went to Angola, and after seeing the conditions under which they were traveling he let out a comment very personal to him, although it seemed casual: "In any event," he said, "they’re going in more comfort than in the Granma."

There was no certainty that the Portuguese military were going to allow the Cuban instructors to disembark. On July 26 that year, when Cuba had already received the first request for aid from the MPLA, Fidel Castro asked Colonel Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho in Havana to arrange the authorization of the Portuguese government to send resources to Angola, and Saraiva de Carvalho promised to secure it, but his response had still not arrived. So the Viet Nam Heroíco reached Port Amboim on October 4 at 6:30 a.m.; the Coral Island arrived on the 7th and La Plata on the 11th at Punta Negra. They arrived without anyone’s permission, but also without anyone’s opposition.

As foreseen, the Cuban instructors were received by the MPLA and the four training schools immediately went into operation. One in Delatando, which the Portuguese called Salazar, 300 kilometers east of Luanda; another in the Atlantic port of Benguela; another in Saurino, formerly Enrique de Carvalho, in the remote and desert eastern province of Luanda, where the Portuguese had had a military base that they destroyed before leaving it; and the fourth in the Cabinda enclave. By then Holden Roberto’s forces were so close to Luanda that when one Cuban artillery instructor was giving the first lessons to his pupils from Delantando they could see the armored tanks of the mercenaries advancing.

On October 23 the South African regular forces penetrated from Namibia with a tank brigade and three days later had occupied the cities of Sa da Bandeira and Moçamedes.

It was a Sunday stroll. The South African were carrying tape recorders with party music installed in their tanks. In the north, the chief of a mercenary column directed operations from a Honda sports car together with a blonde movie star. He advanced with a holiday air, with no exploratory column and would never have had time to see from where the rocket that blew his car to bits was fired. The woman’s suitcase contained only a gala dress, a bikini and an invitation to the victory party that Holden Roberto had already organized in Luanda.

By the end of that week, the South Africans had penetrated into more than 600 kilometers of Angolan territory and were advancing toward Luanda at around 70 kilometers per day. On November 3 they attacked the scant personnel at the Benguela instruction center for recruits. Thus the Cubans had to leave the schools to confront the soldiers with their rookies, to whom they imparted instructions in the pauses between battles. Even the doctors relived their military practice and went to the trenches. The MPLA leaders, prepared for a guerrilla struggle but not for full-scale war, understood at that point that that conspiracy of neighbors, supported by the most rapacious and devastating resources of imperialism, could not be defeated without an urgent appeal to international solidarity.

The internationalist spirit of the Cubans is a historical virtue. Although the Revolution has defended it and magnified it in line with Marxist principles, its essence was very well established in the conduct and works of José Martí. That vocation has been evident – and conflictive – in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

In Algeria, even before the Cuban Revolution proclaimed its socialist nature, Cuba had already lent considerable aid to the FLN combatants in their war on French colonialism. So much so that De Gaulle prohibited, in reprisal, Cubana Aviation flights over French territory. Later, while Cuba was being devastated by Hurricane Flora, a battalion of Cuban internationalist combatants went to defend Algeria against Morocco. I can be said that in these times there is not one African liberation struggle that has not received Cuban solidarity, whether in materials and arms, or through training military and civilian technicians and specialists. Mozambique since 1963, Guinea Bissau from 1965; Cameroon and Sierra Leona have asked for and received solidarity aid from the Cubans at some point. Sekou Touré, president of the Republic of Guinea, repelled a mercenary landing with the help of a unit of Cubans. Comandante Pedro Rodríguez, now a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, was captured by the Portuguese and imprisoned for a number of years in Guinea Bissau. When Agostinho Neto issued a call to Angolan students in Portugal to go and study in socialist countries, many of them were welcomed by Cuba. Currently, all of them are linked to the construction of socialism in Angola and some are in high positions. That is the case of Minga, an economist and the present Minister of Finance in Angola; Enrique Dos Santos, a geological engineer, commander and member of the MPLA Central Committee and married to a Cuban woman; Mantos, an agricultural engineer and current chief of the Military Academy; and N’Dalo who in his time as a student in Cuba shone out as the island’s finest soccer player, and who is currently the second chief of the Angolan First Brigade.

However, none of that so strongly illustrates the longevity and intensity of the presence of Cuba in Africa as that fact that Che Guevara himself, at the peak of his star and his age, went to fight within the Congolese guerrilla movement. He left on April 25, 1965, the same date as his letter of farewell to Fidel Castro, in which he renounced his grade as comandante and everything that legally linked him to the government of Cuba. He went alone, aboard a commercial airliner, under a false name and passport, with his physiognomy radically altered by two master strokes, and an attaché case of literary works and many inhalers for his insatiable asthma and distracted himself in the dead hours in hotel rooms with interminable solitary games of chess. Three months later he was joined by 200 Cuban troops who had traveled from Havana in a ship loaded with weapons. His specific mission was to train guerrillas for the National Council of the Congo Revolution that was fighting against Moises Tshombe, a puppet of the former Belgian colonizers and the international mining companies; Lumumba had been assassinated.

The titular head of the National Council of the Revolution was Gastón Soumaliot, but the man who directed operations was Laurent Cavila from his hideout in Kigona on the opposite bank of the Lake Tanganika. Without doubt, that situation contributed to preserving the real identity of Che Guevara, and he himself, for greater security, did not figure as the principal chief of the mission. For that reason he was known by his pseudonym of Tatu, which is the No 2 man in Swahili.

Che Guevara remained in the Congo from April to December 1965. He not only trained guerrillas but directed them in combat and fought alongside them. His personal links with Fidel Castro, over which there has been so much speculation, were not weakened at any point. Their contact was constant and cordial via highly effective communications systems.

When Moises Tshombe was defeated, the Congolese asked for the withdrawal of the Cubans as a means of facilitating the armistice.

Che Guevara left as he arrived: silently. He went to Dar es Salaam airport in the capital of Tanzania in a commercial aircraft reading a book of chess problems inside out in order to cover his face during the six-hour flight, while his Cuban aide in the next seat tried to entertain the political commissar of the Zanzibar Army, who was an long-time admirer of Che Guevara and who talked about him without stopping during the whole flight, trying to find out news of him and constantly reiterating his desire to see him again.

That fleeting and anonymous time spent by Che Guevara in Africa sowed the seed that was never eradicated. Some of his men went to Brazzaville and there instructed guerrilla units for the PAIGC, headed by Amílcar Cabral, and particularly for the MPLA. One of the columns trained by them entered clandestinely into Angola via Kinshasa and joined the struggle against the Portuguese, under the name of the Camilo Cienfuegos Column. Another infiltrated Cabinda and subsequently crossed the Congo River and embedded itself in the area of Dembo, where Agostinho Neto was born and where the people fought against the Portuguese over five centuries. Thus the solidarity action of Cuba in Angola was not an impulsive and casual act, but a consequence of the continuous policy of the Cuban Revolution in Africa. Only that there was a new and dramatic element in that delicate decision. This time it was not simply to send potential aid, but to undertake a regular large-scale battle over 10,000 kilometers of its territory, with an incalculable economic and human cost and certain unforeseeable political consequences.

The possibility of the United States intervening overtly and not through mercenaries and South Africa, as it had done up to that point, was doubtless one of the most worrying unknowns. However, a rapid analysis makes it evident that they would have had to have thought at least twice about it given when they had just gotten out of the mire of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, with a president that nobody had elected, with the CIA being attacked by Congress and discredited before public opinion, and the need to take care not to appear an ally of racist South Africa, not only by the majority of the African countries but the Black population of the United States, and moreover in the middle of an electoral campaign and the bicentenary. On the other hand, the Cubans were sure of being able to count on the solidarity and material aid of the Soviet Union and other socialist nations, but were also aware of the implications that their actions could have for the policy of peaceful coexistence and the international climate of détente. It was a decision of irreversible consequences and a problem that was too large and complex to be solved in 24 hours. In any event, the Communist Party of Cuba only had 24 hours to make a decision and it decided unhesitatingly on November 5 in a lengthy and serene meeting. As opposed to what has been stated so often, it was an independent and sovereign act on the part of Cuba, and it was after and not before deciding on it that the corresponding notification was given to the Soviet Union. On another November 5 like that one, in 1843, a slave on the Triunvirato sugarcane plantation in Matanzas, known as Black Carlota, had risen up machete in hand at the head of a party of slaves and had died in the rebellion. In tribute to her, the solidarity action in Angola bore her name: Operation Carlota.

Operation Carlota began with the sending of a battalion of 650 men reinforced with special troops. They were transported on aircraft in successive flights over 13 days from the military section of José Martí Airport in Havana to the Luanda airport, still occupied by Portuguese troops.

Their specific mission was to halt the offensive so that the Angolan capital did not fall into the hands of the enemy forces before the Portuguese left, and then maintain the resistance until reinforcements arrived by sea. But the men who left in the two initial flights went already convinced that they would be arriving too late, and only nurtured the final hope of saving Cabinda.

The first contingent left at 4:00 p.m. on November 7 on a special Cubana Aviation flight aboard one of the legendary turboprop Bristol Britannia BB 218’s, which had already been discontinued by their British manufacturers and retired throughout the world. The passengers, who remember very well being 82 because it was the same number as the Granma expeditionaries, had the healthy aspect of tourists bronzed by the Caribbean sun. All were in summer wear, without any military insignia, with business attaché cases and regular passports in their own names and their real identity. The members of the special troop battalion, who did not belong to the Revolutionary Armed Forces but to the Ministry of the Interior, are highly skilled soldiers with a high ideological and political level, some of them with an academic background, who are habitual readers and reveal a constant concern for their intellectual development. Thus, that fiction of Sunday civilians would not have appeared as anything new.

But in their attaché cases they carried submachine guns and instead of baggage, the aircraft hold contained a large arsenal of light artillery, individual weapons of war, three 75-millimeter cannons and three 82-millimeter mortars.

The only change made on the plane attended by two regular stewards was a compartment in the floor to pull out arms from the passenger cabin in a case of emergency.

The flight from Havana to Luanda was made with a stopover in Barbados to refuel in the midst of a tropical storm, and another five-hour stopover in Guinea Bissau, with the principal aim of waiting until nightfall to fly in secret to Brazzaville. The Cubans took advantage of those five hours to sleep and that was the most horrific sleep of the voyage, because there were so many mosquitoes in the airport stores that the cot sheets were covered in blood.

With his proverbial arrogance, Mobutu has said that Brazzaville is illuminated by the reflection of Kinshasa, the modern and brilliant capital of Zaire. In that he was to an extent correct. The two cities are situated facing each other with the Congo River in between and their respective airports are so close that the first Cuban pilots had to study them really closely so as not to land on the enemy airstrip. They landed without any setback, with the lights turned off so as not to be seen from the opposite bank and remained in Brazzaville just long enough to inform themselves by radio of the situation in Angola. The Angolan commander, Xieta, who had good relations with the Portuguese commissioner, had obtained his authorization for the Cubans to land in Luanda. And so they did, at 10:00 p.m. on November 8 without the help of the control tower and in a torrential rainstorm. Fifteen minutes later a second aircraft arrived. At that moment, three boats were just leaving Cuba, loaded with an artillery regiment, a battalion of motorized troops and response artillery personnel, which began to disembark in Angola on November 27. On the other hand, Holden Roberto’s columns were so close that, a few hours earlier, they had fired on and killed an old woman trying to reach the Gran Farni garrison where the Cubans were gathered. Thus, the Cubans had no time to rest. They donned their khakis, joined the MPLA ranks and went into combat.

On account of security, the Cuban press had not published news of the participation in Angola. But as is usually the case even with military matters as delicate as that, the operation was a closely guarded secret among eight million people. The 1st Congress of the Communist Party, which was to take place a few weeks later and was a kind of national obsession throughout the year, then acquired a new dimension.

The procedure utilized to make up the units of volunteers was a private summons to the members of the first reserve that covers all men aged 17 to 25 and those who had been members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. They were called by telegram to the corresponding Military Committee without mentioning the motive but it was so evident that everyone who thought they had the military capacity rushed to their respective committee without waiting for a telegram and it took a lot of work to prevent that mass application turning into a national disorder.

To the point that the urgency of the situation permitted, the selection criteria were very strict. They took into account not only military qualifications and physical and moral conditions, but also work records and political training. Despite that rigor, there were numerous cases of volunteers who managed to get around the selection filter. There were the cases of a qualified engineer who passed himself off as a truck driver, a senior official who managed to pass as a mechanic and a woman who was at the point of being admitted as a private. There was also a boy who went without his father’s permission and later met up with him in Angola, because his father had also gone there without the family knowing. On the other hand, a 20-year-old sergeant could not find any way whatsoever to go, and had to endure his wounded male pride, as his mother was sent as a journalist and his girlfriend as a doctor. Some common criminals applied to be admitted from prison, but no-one was contemplated among those cases.

The first woman to go at the beginning of December had been rejected various times with the argument that "that was very heavy for a woman." She was ready to go as a stowaway in a boat and had already put her clothes in the hold with the complicity of a photographer comrade, when she discovered that she had been selected to go legally and by plane. Her name is Esther Lilia Díaz Rodríguez, a former 23-year-old teacher who entered the Revolutionary Armed Forces in 1969, and had a good score in infantry firing. Along with her, three of her brothers: César, Rubén and Erineldo also made their own ways to Angola. Each of the four, separately, and without the others’ knowledge, told their mother that they were going on military maneuvers in Camagüey related to the Party Congress. They all returned safe and sound, and their mother is proud that they have been in Angola, but has not forgiven them for the lie about the maneuvers in Camagüey.

Conversation with those who returned makes it possible to establish that certain Cubans wanted to go to Angola for very diverse personal reasons. At least one got through with the simple proposition of deserting, and went on to hijack a Portuguese plane and ask for asylum in Lisbon. Nobody went by force; before leaving, all of them had to sign their volunteer form. Some refused to go after being selected and became the victims of all kind of public mockery and private scorn. But there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority went to Angola with the full conviction of fulfilling an act of political solidarity, with the same awareness and the same courage with which, 15 years previously, they had repelled the Bay of Pigs landing, and for that very reason Operation Carlota was not a simple expedition by professional soldiers, but a people’s war.

For nine months, the mobilization of human and material resources was an entire epic of temerity. The decrepit Britannias, mended with Soviet Ilyushin brakes, kept up a constant and almost improbable traffic. Although their normal takeoff weight is 185,000 pounds, they flew on many occasions with 194,000, which is above all the rates. The pilots, whose normal flying hours should have been 75 per month, went up to more than 200. In general, each one of the three Britannias in service carried two complete crews who took turns during the flight. But one single pilot recalls being in his seat for up to 50 hours on a two-way flight, with 43 hours of effective flying. "There are moments that you feel so tired that you cannot be any more tired," he said without any pretensions to heroism. Due to the difference in hours, in those conditions the pilots and stewards lost count of time and their only orientation was their bodily needs: they ate only when they were hungry and slept only when they were tired.

The route from Havana to Luanda is unprotected and deserted. At the cruising altitude of the Britannias – between 18,000 and 20,000 feet, information on winds is non-existent in this jet age. The pilots took off in every sense without knowing the state of the route, flying at undue altitudes to save fuel and without the slightest idea of the conditions on arrival. Between Brazzaville and Luanda, the most dangerous section, there was no alternative airport. Moreover, the soldiers were traveling with arms in the hold, and explosives and rockets were carried without crates and thermoses to reduce the weight.

The United States noted the weakest aspect of the Britannias: their scant flight autonomy. When it managed to get the Barbados government to stop refueling the planes, the Cubans established a transatlantic route from Holguín in the extreme east of Cuba to Salt Island in Cape Verde. It was an operation of tightrope walkers without nets, because on the flight out the planes arrived with barely enough fuel for two hours of flying, and on the route back, due to headwinds, they arrived with reserves for just one hour. However, that circus route was also halted to avoid damage to the indefensible Cape Verde. At that point four supplementary tanks of fuel were adapted in the cabin which allowed them to fly without a stopover, but with 30 passengers less, from Holguín to Brazzaville. The intermediate solution of making a stopover in Guyana was not suitable, in the first place because the landing strip was very short and, in second place because Texaco, the exploiter of oil in Guyana, refused to sell the fuel.

Cuba tried to solve this by sending a boat loaded with fuel, but on account of an incomprehensible accident, it was contaminated with soil and water. In the midst of so many and such harsh adversities, the Guyanese government remained firm in its solidarity with the Cubans, despite the fact that the U.S. ambassador in person threatened to bomb and destroy Georgetown Airport. The maintenance was done in less than half the normal time, and one pilot remembers having flown various times without radar, but none of them remember any instrument failing. In those unimaginable conditions they made 101 flights to the war terminal.

The maritime transportation was no less dramatic. In the two passenger liners, of 4,000 tons each, all the free space was adapted into dormitories, and latrines were improvised in the cabaret, bars and corridors. Their normal total of 226 passengers was tripled on some voyages. The cargo ships for 800 came to transport more than 1,000 passengers with armored tanks, weapons and explosives. It was necessary to adapt cooking tents in the cargo hold and in the bows. They used disposable plates to economize on water and yogurt containers instead of glasses. The ballast tanks were used for bathing and 50 latrines were set up on the deck that discharged overboard. The worn out engines of the oldest boats began to resist after six months of exceptional use. That was the only reason for exasperation for the first repatriates, whose much desired return was delayed for various days because the Viet Nam Heroíco filters became clogged. The other units in the convoy were forced to wait for it, and some of its passengers then comprehended Che Guevara when he affirmed that the march of a guerrilla is determined by the man who advances the least. Those obstacles were the most distressing in that period as the Cuban boats were a target for all kinds of provocations by U.S. destroyers, who harassed them for days at a time, and warplanes photographed them and besieged them with low-flying attacks.

In spite of the harsh conditions of those voyages of close to 20 days, there was no grave health problem. During the 42 voyages made during the six months of the war, the medical services on board had nothing to do except an appendicitis operation and another for a hernia, and only had to combat an outbreak of diarrhea provoked by canned meat. On the other hand, a more difficult epidemic had to be controlled, that of the crew, who wished to remain at all costs fighting in Angola. One of them, a reserve officer, managed to get hold of a combat uniform, disembarked among the troops, and stayed behind. He was one of the good information officers that excelled during the war.

In any case, the Soviet material aid that entered by various channels required the constant arrival of qualified personnel to drive and teach the handling of new weapons and complex machines unknown to the Angolans. The Cuban General Chief of Staff was transferred to Angola at the end of November. At that time everything seemed admissible apart from losing the war.

However, the historical truth is that it was at the point of being lost. In the first week of December the situation was so desperate that the possibility of reinforcing the troops in Cabinda and saving a beachhead in the area of Luanda in order to initiate the evacuation was discussed. To add to the anguish, that gloomy prospect came at the worst moment, both for the Cubans and the Angolans. The Cubans were preparing for the 1st Party Congress, scheduled for December 17-22 and their leaders were aware of the fact that a military setback in Angola would be a mortal political blow. For their part, the Angolans were preparing for an imminent conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and would have wanted to attend with a military position more propitious for inclining the majority of the African countries in their favor.

The adversities of December were due, in the first place, to the firepower of the enemy, which by that date had already received more than $50 million in military aid from the United States. In the second place it was due to the delay in Angola asking for Cuban aid, and the enforced slowness of the transportation of resources. And finally it was due to the conditions of poverty and cultural backwardness left in Angola by 500 years of soulless colonialism. More than the first two, it was this last point that created the greatest difficulties in terms of the decisive integration of the Cuban combatants and the armed people of Angola.

In reality, the Cubans encountered the same climate, the same vegetation, the same apocalyptical rainstorms and the same deafening dusks with the scent of underbrush and alligators. Some of them so closely resembled the Angolans that very soon the festive version that it was only possible to distinguish them by touching the points of their noses, because the Africans have a soft cartilage from the way in which mothers carry their babies with their faces squashed against their backs.

The Portuguese colonialists, possible the most voracious and mean in history, constructed modern and beautiful cities to live in for life, containing buildings with tinted glass and colorful stores with enormous illuminated letters. But they were cities for whites, like those that the gringos were constructing around Old Havana, and which the country people looked at in amazement when they came down from the Sierra for the first time with their guns on their shoulders.

Under that shell of civilization lay a vast and rich country of poverty. The standard of living of the native population was one of the lowest in the world, the illiteracy rate was over 90% and the cultural conditions were still very close to the Stone Age. Even in the cities of the interior, the only people who spoke Portuguese were the men, and these lived with up to seven wives in the same house. Atavistic superstitions were not only an inconvenience in terms of daily life, but also for the war. The Angolans had always been convinced that bullets did not penetrate the whites, had a magical fear of aircraft and refused to fight in trenches because they said that graves wee only for the dead. Che Guevara had already seen in the Congo that the fighters put on a necklace against cannon fire and a bracelet against submachine gunfire, and burned their faces with charcoal to confront the risks of war. He was so interested in those cultural absurdities that he studied African idiosyncrasies and learnt to speak Swahili to try to modify them from within, aware of the pernicious and profound force sown in people’s hearts and that it is not possible to defeat: the bullet of mental colonization.

The sanitary conditions were, of course, atrocious. In San Pedro de Cota the Cubans virtually forcibly took away to cure a boy whose body was entirely burned with boiling water and whose family were mourning him alive because they believed he couldn’t be saved.

The Cuban doctors came across illnesses that they didn’t even know. Under Portuguese rule there were only 90 doctors in Angola for six million inhabitants, and the majority were concentrated in the capital. When the Portuguese went only 30 doctors remained. The day he reached Port Amboim a Cuban pediatrician saw five children die without being able to do anything for lack of resources. For a doctor of 35, trained in a country with one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, that was an unbearable experience.

The MPLA had made great progress against primitivism in their long and silent years of struggle against Portuguese domination, and in that way created the conditions for the final victory. In the liberated territories the political and cultural level of the population was rising, tribalism and racism were being confronted and free education and public heath care being fomented. It was the seed of a new society. However, those meritorious and unusual efforts were minuscule when the war of guerrillas became a large and modern war and it became necessary to appeal not only to people with military and political training, but to all the people of Angola.

It was an atrocious war, in which one had to be as careful of mercenaries as snakes, and of cannons as well as cannibals. One Cuban commander fell into an elephant trap in full combat. The black Africans, conditioned by an atavistic rancor against the Portuguese, were initially hostile to white Cubans. Many times, above all in Cabinda, the Cuban explorers felt themselves given away by the primitive telegraph of the talking drums, whose tom-tom could be heard at a distance of 35 kilometers. For their part, the white South African soldiers fired on ambulances with 140 cannons, threw smokescreens into the battlefield to collect their white dead, and left the black troops for the vultures. In the house of a UNITA minister who lived with the comforts of his rank, the MPLA men found in a refrigerator the surplus entrails and various flasks with the frozen blood of prisoners of war who had been eaten.

Only bad news was reaching Cuba. On December 11, in Hengo, from where a strong FAPLA offensive was being launched against the South African invaders, an armored vehicle from Cuba carrying four commanders ventured down a path on which sappers had detected some mines. Even though four vehicles had previously passed unscathed, the sappers warned the armored vehicle not to take that route, whose only advantage was to save a few minutes that moreover did not seem necessary. As soon as it went onto the road, the car was blown into the air by an explosion. Two commanders from the special forces battalion were seriously injured. Comandante Raúl Díaz Argüelles, general commander of internationalist operations in Angola, a hero of the struggle against Batista and much loved in Cuba, was killed on the spot. It was one of the bitterest news for the Cubans, but it would not be the last during that bad spell. The next day, the Catofe disaster occurred, perhaps the greatest setback of the entire war. It happened like this: a South African column had managed to repair a bridge over the Nhia River with impressive speed, having crossed the river with the help of a misty dawn, and had surprised the Cubans in the tactical rearguard. The analysis of that defeat showed that it was due to an error by the Cubans. A European military officer with extensive experience in World War II who stated that that analysis was too severe, later told a high-ranking Cuban leader: "You (Cubans) don’t know what a war error is." But according to the Cubans it was, and a very serious one, just five days before the Party Congress.

Fidel Castro himself was up to date on the tiniest details of the war. He had attended the dispatch of all the ships and before they left had given a rousing speech to combat units in the La Cabaña theater. He had personally gone out to find the commanders of the Special Forces battalion that went on the first flight, and had taken them to the boarding steps of the plane driving his own Soviet jeep. It is likely on that occasion, as at each one of the send-offs, that Fidel Castro had to repress a deep feeling of envy of those who were leaving for a war that he himself could not experience. By that time, there was not a single point on Angola’s map that he could not identify, nor a single incident on the ground that he did not know by heart. His concentration on the war was so intense and meticulous that he could cite any statistic on Angola as if it were Cuba, and would talk about its cities, customs and people as though he had lived there all his life.

At the beginning of the war, when the situation was pressing, Fidel Castro remained in the general staff command room for up to 14 hours continuously, and sometimes without eating or sleeping, as though he were out in the field. He followed battle details with colored pins on wall-sized, meticulous maps, and was in constant communication with the MPLA high command on the battlefield, where it was to be found six hours later. Some of his reactions during those uncertain days revealed his certainty of victory. An MPLA combat unit was forced to dynamite a bridge to delay the advance of South African armored columns. Fidel Castro suggested in a message to them: "Don’t blow up any more bridges, because you won’t be able to pursue them afterwards." He was right. Just weeks later, brigades of Angolan and Cuban engineers had to repair 13 bridges in 20 days to reach the scattered invaders.

On December 22, during the closing session of the Party Congress, Cuba officially acknowledged for the first time that Cuban troops were fighting in Angola. The war situation remained uncertain. In his closing address Fidel Castro revealed that the invaders of Cabinda had been smashed in 72 hours; that on the Northern Front, Holden Roberto’s troops, which were 25 kilometers from Luanda on November 10, had had to retreat more than 100 kilometers; and that the South African armored columns, which in less than 20 days had advanced 700 kilometers, had been halted more than 200 kilometers from Luanda, and had not been able to advance any further. It was comforting and honest information, but victory was still a long way off. The Angolans had better luck on January 12 at the OUA conference in Addis Ababa. A few days earlier, troops led by Cuban Commander Víctor Schueg Colás, an enormous, cordial black man who before the Revolution had been an auto mechanic, expelled Holden Roberto from the illustrious capital of Carmona, occupied the city and a few hours later took the Negage military base. Cuba’s help at that time became so intense, that by early January, 15 Cuban boats were sailing at the same time toward Luanda. The MPLA’s uncontainable offensive on all fronts turned the situation in their favor for good. So much so, that by mid-January, offense operations planned for April went ahead on the Southern Front. South Africa had Camberra airplanes, and Zaire was operating with Mirages and Fiats. Angola lacked aviation, because the Portuguese destroyed the bases before withdrawing. They were only able to make use of some old DC-3s that Cuban pilots had put into service, and which sometimes had to land at night, full of the wounded, on strips that were barely illuminated with improvised lights, and which reached their destinations with vines and garlands of jungle flowers wrapped around the wheels. At one point, Angola had a squadron of MiG-17s with its respective staff of Cuban pilots, but they were considered as a reserve for the high military command, and had only been used during the defense of Luanda.

In early March, the Northern Front was liberated after the defeat of the British mercenaries and gringos whom the CIA had indirectly recruited at the last minute in a desperate operation. All the troops, with their complete general staff, were concentrated in the south. The Benguela railroad had been liberated, and UNITA was disintegrating into such a state of disorder that an MPLA rocket in Gago Cutinho destroyed the house that Jonas Savimbi had occupied until one hour earlier.

In mid-March, the South African troops began disbanding. It must have been a supreme order, for fear that the MPLA would continue its pursuit through subjected Namibia and would take the war to South African territory itself.

That possibility no doubt would have had the support of all of Black Africa and the large majority of UN member states opposed to racial discrimination. The Cuban combatants were in no doubt as to that when they were ordered to transfer en masse to the Southern Front. But on March 27, when the fleeing South Africans crossed the border and took refuge in Namibia, the only order received by the MPLA was to occupy the abandoned reservoirs and guarantee the well-being of workers of any nationality.

On April 1, at 9:15 a.m., the MPLA scouting party led by Cuban Commander Leopoldo Cintras Frías arrived at the Raucana Reservoir, right up against the chicken-wire fence marking the border. One hour and 15 minutes later, General Ewefp, the South African governor of Namibia, accompanied by two officers from his army, asked for authorization to cross the border and initiate discussions with the MPLA. Commander Cintras Frías received them in a wooden barrack hut built on the 10-meter wide neutral strip separating the two countries, and the delegates from each side with their respective interpreters sat down to talk around a long dining table. General Ewefp, a very fat balding man in his 50s, did his best to present the image of a sympathetic, very worldly man, and accepted all of the MPLA’s conditions. It took two hours to reach an agreement. But the meeting lasted longer, because General Ewefp had a succulent lunch brought in for everybody, prepared on the Namibian side, and as they ate he made several toasts with beer and recounted for his adversaries how he had lost the little finger of his right hand in a traffic accident.

In late May, Henry Kissinger visited Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in Stockholm, and upon leaving, declared jubilantly to the international media that Cuban troops were withdrawing from Angola. The news, according to him, was in a personal letter that Fidel Castro had written to Olof Palme. Kissinger’s joy was understandable, because the withdrawal of the Cuban troops took a burden off him in the context of U.S. public opinion, agitated by the electoral campaign.

The truth is that on that occasion, Fidel Castro had not sent any letter to Olof Palme. However, the information was correct, although incomplete. In reality, the plan of withdrawal for Cuban troops from Angola had been agreed upon by Fidel Castro and Agostinho Neto during their meeting on March 14 in Conakry, when victory was already a fact. They decided that the withdrawal would be gradual, but that as many Cubans as necessary would remain in Angola for as long as it took to organize a modern, strong army capable of guaranteeing future domestic security and the country’s independence, without help from anybody.

Thus, when Henry Kissinger committed that breach of confidence in Stockholm, more than 3,000 combatants had already returned to Cuba from Angola, and many more were on their way. There was also an attempt to keep the return secret for security purposes. But Esther Lilia Díaz Rodríguez, the first young woman who went and one of the first to return by plane, received yet more proof of the Cuban people’s ingenuity for knowing everything. Esther had been taken for a rigorous medical check-up at the Naval Hospital in Havana before informing her family of her return. After 48 hours, she was authorized to leave, and got into a taxi at the corner that took her home without comment, but the driver did not want to charge her for the ride because he knew she was returning from Angola. "How did you find out?" Esther asked, perplexed. The driver answered, "Because yesterday I saw you on the Naval Hospital balcony and only those coming back from Angola are there."

I arrived in Havana during those days, and from the airport I had the definite impression that something very profound had occurred in Cuban life since the last time I was there, a year previously.

There had been an indefinable but extremely notable change, not only in people’s spirits, but also in the nature of things, in the animals and sea, and in the essence itself of Cuban life. There was a new masculine fashion of entire suits made of light cloth and short-sleeve jackets. New Portuguese words were being used in the street. There were new accents in the old African accents of popular music. There were noisier than usual discussions in the lines at stores and in the packed buses, among those who had been resolute supporters of the action in Angola and those who were just beginning to understand it. However, the most interesting and strange experience was that the repatriates seemed to be aware that they had contributed to changing world history, but were acting with the naturalness and the decency of those who had simply done their duty.

On the other hand, perhaps they themselves were not conscious of the fact that on another level, perhaps less generous but also more humane, even Cubans without too much passion felt compensated by life after many years of unjust setbacks. In 1970, when the 10-million-ton sugar harvest failed, Fidel Castro asked the people to change the defeat into victory. But in reality, Cubans had been doing that for a long time, with a tenacious political awareness and a moral strength put totally to the test. Since the Bay of Pigs victory more than 15 years earlier, they had had to assimilate, with teeth clenched, the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia and President Salvador Allende in the midst of the Chile catastrophe; they had suffered the extermination of guerrilla fighters in Latin America and the endless night of the blockade, and the deeply hidden, implacable worm of so many internal errors from the past that at one point had them on the brink of disaster. All of that, on the margin of the irreversible but slow and arduous victories of the Revolution, must have created for Cubans an accumulated sensation of undeserved penance. Angola finally gave them the gratification of a great victory that they needed so much.