Afrikaner vs Cuban: the irony of Cuito Cuanavale

Once tentative talks between South Africa, Cuba, Russia, and America commenced early 1987 about the end of the Angolan War and Independence for Namibia, Pik Botha, South Africa's long serving foreign minister thought it time for the Cubans to get a history lecture.

This article continues from Cuito Cuanavale - background to a Battle.


In a rhetorical flourish at one of their meetings Botha made it abundantly clear to the astonished Cubans that Afrikaners have a proud history on the battlefield. After all, they had withstood the might of the British Empire, no less than a half a million troops, for 3 years. Don't underestimate our resolve, don't mess with us, was the message.

But Afrikaners would have done well to also learn and understand the history of their opponents, the Cubans.

The Nationalists had form in this regard. They had consistently underestimated the role of the Cubans, thinking they were mere pawns of the Soviets. When in 1975 Cuba jumped to the rescue of the Angolan MPLA, Pretoria thought it was at Russia's bidding. In fact it was, at least originally against Russia's wishes.

But to be fair, neither did the US believe the Cubans were acting on their own initiative. Nobody believed that such a small developing country would project military power at such a range.

Nevertheless, a bit more knowledge about the Cubans could have given the Afrikaner Nationalists pause for thought about the motives that drove their enemy. Perhaps a clue as to their intent, their determination and the way they would react in battle.

More importantly it could have given them a glimpse of what Afrikaners themselves could have been. A chance imagining themselves differently.

But why would Cuban history have resonance with Afrikaners?

Come the mid 1980's Afrikaner leaders might not have admitted it, but they felt sullied. Their intellectuals were decrying them, their writers were claiming 'Ons is nie almal so nie'. (Were not all like that).

Strange because Afrikaners had part of their identity a grand sense of being a people battling injustice. They had, as Pik pointed out, fought a fierce anti-colonial war of liberation against a European superpower. An act that had become part of the core of Afrikaner identity.

But so had the Cubans. And at more or less the same time at the turn of the previous century. In fact the Cuban and Afrikaner struggle dovetailed and even influenced each other.

But for all his huffing and puffing Botha knew they were not seen as freedom fighters but as apartheid: they were racial domination and colonialism personified.

The Cuban delegation lead by Jorge Risquest did not suffer this fate. Increasingly they reveled in the role as the anti-colonial, anti-racist revolutionary force in the world.

Considering all this, that it came to be that from 1975 Afrikaner and Cuban came to face each other in Angola, is a surpreme irony. An irony that both sides were blissfully unaware of.

Cuito Cuanavale the last big battle of the Cold War would be a fitting grand finale.

Raising the stakes

Make no mistake, although the MPLA's Fapla, and UNITA's army represented by far the majority of troops on the ground, and suffered the majority of the casualties, they were the light weights in this crowded ring. The SADF's Colonel Breytenbach had famously described his allies Unita as "useless". No doubt thought the same of the MPLA's troops who he routinely routed. The only Angolans in the conflict whose military prowess he valued was those fighting in his 32 battalion.

The Soviets's never really stepped into the ring but preferred to provided ample resources, intelligence training and weapons. The US also provided resources and weapons, but they did it in secret and at a much smaller scale.

It was the Cuban and South African army that raised the military game at crucial junctures. Without one of them the war would be over in weeks. The South African army was made up mostly of both English and Afrikaans speaking whites. But it was Afrikaner controlled, it spoke Afrikaans and had gone into this conflict at least partly at the behest of Afrikaner interests.

But where is the irony?

But lets go back to 1901 to the second Anglo Boer War. South Africa's Boers' military guerilla exploits were making world news. But the world was also startled about the shocking reports of non combatant mortalities.

Boer Commandos

In a report Concentration camps in November 1901 in the New York Times the link between South Africa and Cuba is made.

The nearest prototype of the camps of concentration established by Lord KITCHENER in South Africa were those established by Gen. WEYLER in Cuba.

The newspaper speculates that at the rate of mortality all the South African "reconcentrados", (the Spanish word used in Cuba) will be dead in 4 years time:

'When South Africa ceases to be in a "disturbed condition" It seems that it will be because the invaders "made a solitude and called it peace." '

The New York Times were of course comparing events in South Africa in 1901 to those that had gone before in Cuba's Third War for Independence from Spain that started in 1895.

Spanish tactics were remarkably similar to what the British followed in South Africa from 1900. Most probably because the British emulated them. First they used trochas to limit the movement of the Cuban rebel army. The History of Cuba website explains the trocha system.

The trocha was "a broad belt across the island," about two hundred yards wide and fifty miles long, designed to limit rebel movement to the eastern provinces. Down the center, a single-track military railroad was equipped with armor-clad cars, and various forts and fortified blockhouses were built alongside. A maze of barbed wire was placed so that every twelve yards of posts had 450 yards of barbed-wire fencing. The fortified houses featured loopholes and trenches on the outside, and many encircled windows from which Spanish soldiers could observe and fire.

This was not at all dissimilar to the British Blockhouses that carved up the South Africa landscape, when the Boers started their guerrilla campaign. The British linked the blockhouses with barbed wire fences to parcel up the wide veld into smaller areas easier to control the marauding Boer Commandos.

Next came a "Scorched Earth" policy under which they targeted everything within the controlled areas that could give sustenance to the Boer guerrillas with a view to making it harder and harder for the Boers to survive.

As British troops swept the countryside, they systematically destroyed crops, burned homesteads and farms, poisoned wells, and interned women, children and workers in concentration camps.

But this too had its antecedent in Cuba. Spanish General Weyler implemented a system of what he called “re-concentration”. In this system various fortified areas were designated, and all inhabitants were given eight days to move in, including cattle and other animals. Anyone caught outside was considered the enemy and killed. It is estimated that up to 200,000 Cubans died in these Concentration camps.

By the end of 1897, there were 240,000 regulars and 60,000 Spanish irregulars on the island. Like the Boers, numerically the Cubans was supposed to have no chance.

Winston Churchill had travelled to South Africa to cover the Boer war. But a few years earlier he was in Cuba.

Writing in New York's Saturday Review, Winston Churchill expressed reluctant concern at the fact that "two-thirds of the Cuban rebels were black," adding that it would be beneficial to US. interests if Spain kept control of the island.


Cuban figthers

But the Americans were concerned by the deaths and suffering in Cuba. But the way in which this concern was expressed had made the Cuban rebels suspicious. Not that the USA would follow Churchillian advice and support the Spanish mind you.

They suspected that the Americans had other ulterior motives. The fears proved well founded when the US joined the War against Spain and annexed the island.

By then Cuban commanders had realised the importance of sizing the west of the island. Failing to get the west was partly why they had not managed to won in the previous wars of independence. In a daring mission lasting ninety days, the invading army went from its eastern tip to the western end traveling a total of 1,700 kilometers and fighting 27 battles against numerically superior forces.

The History of Cuba website explains the situation when the US entered the War:

'By the time the US entered the war in 1898, Spain was running for cover, and a Cuban victory was certain. The Spanish troops had been forced back into the urban areas, making them easy targets. The rebels controlled the countryside, and the Spaniards found it impossible to retreat.'

On August 11 Spain accepted the peace terms, in which the US received control of 4 new territories: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.

Although the treaty officially granted Cuba's independence (anti-imperialists in the Senate had made sure that laws were passed excluding Cuba from becoming a US territory), it was the US flag, not the Cuban flag, that was raised over Havana, and during the surrender ceremonies in Santiago de Cuba, US General William R. Shafter refused to allow Cuban General Calixto García and his rebel forces to participate.

In December 1898, one year before Boer forces thwarted British dreams to be home in Britain in time for Christmas, Cuba faced a new invasion.

A US newspaper wrote “Whatever may be decided as to the political future of Cuba, it’s industrial and commercial future will be directed by American enterprise with American capital.”

The American provisional military governments, which controlled Cuban money, refused to provide loans to farmers and landowners.

Foner a historian wrote:

“This was the legacy of American military occupation, and the refusal to permit the use of the funds belonging to the Cuban people to assist the small farmers and planters to retain their land and rebuild their properties, damaged or destroyed during the Revolution.

…Americans were most ‘energetic’ in picking up land at low prices from people who were without means, and for whom the Occupation government refused to provide loans so that they could develop their property.”

Concessions for the railway was won by American companies, and soon the sugar and tobacco industries once controlled by the Spanish was American. American newspapers and Generals urged their government to incorporate the island into the US against earlier legal provisions.

Like Lord Milner who governed South Africa after the Boer War, and who regarded Afrikaners as ignorant and who wanted the country to be incorporated into an English Empire for its own good, US news papers were plugging for much the same in the case of Cuba.

An editorial in the New York Sun, on April 13 1900, summed up the pro US point of view. “The attitude of the people of Cuba toward annexation seems to be this in brief; the wealth and intelligence of the island are generally in favor of it, and the agitators and their tools, the ignorant Negroes, are opposed to it.”

Black or mixed race Cubans had allot to worry about. The US view on race now held sway on the island. It was even suggested that black Cubans had not made an equal contribution to the war.

In 1901, US military governor Wood expressed the need to "whiten" the Cuban population.

Governor Wood's attempt to create an all-white-Cuban artillery corps led to strong opposition from veteran leaders of the Liberation Army. According to Pérez, "white (Cuban) veterans made it clear that there was a blatant contradiction between the integrationism of Cuban nationalist discourse and the segregationist policy of the U.S. Government of Occupation."

In the objection of white veterans to this attempt to exclude black Cubans lies much of what makes Cuba exceptional, not just to South Africans, but to other nations as well.

Cuba had already long history of struggle for racial unity. In fact it could be said that this search for racial unity had already by 1901 become integral to Cuban identity.

But why was Cuba so different? Why this commitment to non racialism that has bedevilled so much of the rest of the world? A comparison with the identity formation of Afrikaners is instructive.

(To be continued)

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