Castro not only helped the insurgents in Latin America prepare a new revolutionary offensive. He also turned to Africa. Even before coming to power, the Cuban revolutionaries had seen similarities between the Algerian revolution against French rule and their own struggle against Batista and the United States. In December 1961, a Cuban ship unloaded weapons at Casablanca for the Algerian rebels. It returned to Havana with seventy-six wounded Algerian fighters and twenty orphans from refugee camps. In May 1963, after Algeria had gained its independence, a 55-person Cuban medical mission arrived in Algiers to establish a program of free health care for the Algerian people. “It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew that the Algerian people needed it even more than we did, and that they deserved it,” explained the minister of public health.443 In October 1963, when Algeria was threatened by Morocco, the Cubans rushed a force of 686 men with heavy weapons to the Algerians, jeopardizing a contract Morocco had just signed with Havana to buy i million tons of Cuban sugar for $184 million, a considerable amount of hard currency at a time when the United States was trying to cripple Cuba’s economy.
Cuba’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa quickened in late 1964. This was the moment of the great illusion when the Cubans, and many others, believed that revolution beckoned in Africa. Guerrillas were fighting the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. In Congo Brazzaville, a new government proclaimed its revolutionary sympathies. Above all, there was Zaire, where armed revolt threatened the corrupt pro-American regime that Eisenhower and Kennedy had laboriously put in place. 444 To save the Zairean regime, the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson raised an army of approximately 1,000 white mercenaries in a major covert operation that provoked a wave of revulsion even among African leaders friendly to the United States. In December 1964, Che Guevara went on a three-month trip to Africa. The following February, in Tanzania, he offered the Zairean rebels "about thirty instructors and all the weapons we could spare." They accepted "with delight.” Che left with "the joy of having found people ready to fight to the finish. Our next task was to select a group of black Cubans - all volunteers - to join the struggle in Zaire.”445 From April to July 1965, approximately 120 Cubans, led by Che, entered Zaire. In August, 250 Cubans, under Jorge Risquet, arrived in neighboring Congo Brazzaville at the request of that country’s government, which feared an attack by the CIA’s mercenaries; the column would also, if possible, assist Che in Zaire.
But Central Africa was not ready for revolution. By the time the Cubans arrived in Zaire, the mercenaries had broken the resolve of the rebels, leaving Che no choice by November 1965 but to withdraw. In Congo Brazzaville, Risquet’s column saved the host government from a military coup in June i966 and trained the rebels of Agostinho Neto’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) before withdrawing in December 1966.
The late 1960s were a period of deepening maturity in Cuba’s relationship with Africa. No longer deluded that revolution was around the corner, the
23. Fidel Castro (left), Raul Castro, and Che Guevara (right) in October 1963, finalizing the plan to send Cuban troops to Algeria to protect it from Moroccan aggression.
Cubans were learning about the continent. In those years, the focus of Havana’s attention in Africa was Guinea-Bissau, where rebels were fighting for independence from Portugal. At their request, in 1966 Cuban military instructors and doctors arrived in Guinea-Bissau, where they remained until the end of the war in 1974. This was the longest and most successful Cuban intervention in Africa before the dispatch of troops to Angola in 1975.
World History
