Abstract
This work places Cuban internationalism, specifically its military mission in Angola, as an entry point to explore Cuban culture, the larger context of transnational memories, historicity, and racial politics. This extraordinary exchange between two emerging nation-states created a transnational space where national identity was contested, reevaluated, and transformed. The personal memories of the Cuban veterans are inextricably tied to social and historical disjunctures in contemporary Cuban society, including colonialism, apartheid, the end of the Cold War, and the ongoing economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Bloc. The memories of these men are nuanced, contradictory, and do not always correspond with the national narrative, particularly concerning race, which stressed a Latin-African identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Most informants did not feel comfortable being recorded, so I relied on field notes, ultimately generating over 450 pages of single-spaced notes and almost ten hours of recorded interviews.
- 2.
Fidel Castro, “Exclusive in Soviet Trip to Siempre,” July 3, 1963, Castro Speech Data Base, Latin American Network Information Center, University of Texas at Austin, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1963/19630703.html.
- 3.
Lockwood, Castro’s Cuba, 288.
- 4.
Guevara, Man and Socialism, 45.
- 5.
Guevara, Man and Socialism, 45.
- 6.
Researchers and journalists trying to understand the violence that engulfed Angola shortly before independence and for 27 years afterwards have emphasized tribal and ethnic chauvinisms. Recent scholarship argues instead that political, regional, ideological, and economic allegiances intersected with individual quests for power, exacerbated by Cold War politics. The guerilla groups were not necessarily ethnic adversaries, but rather the “conflict became, as Christine Messiant puts it ‘ethnicized.’” Cooper, Africa since 1940, 140. Inge Brinkman notes that shortly before independence there were 58 different political groups vying for control of the government, of which the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) [UNITA], the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, and the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (National Liberation Front of Angola) were the largest; economic and political differences, not ethnic or tribal ones, were the main causes of divisions among the groups. Brinkman, “War and Identity,” 205–206.
- 7.
The MPLA leadership, including Neto, consisted of mostly foreign-educated intellectuals who had lived in Paris and Lisbon. The party was the most racially mixed, with a high number of mulattos in its membership, and the leaders sought to integrate Angolan whites into the independence movement.
- 8.
Fidel Castro, “Speech by Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro,” Granma (Havana), March 17, 1976.
- 9.
Fidel Castro, “Speech by Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro,” Granma (Havana), May 2, 1976.
- 10.
Fidel Castro, “Speech by Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro,” Granma (Havana), July 28, 1976.
- 11.
Taber, Fidel Castro Speeches, 345.
- 12.
Stoner, “Militant Heroines,” 92.
- 13.
García Márquez, “Operación Carlota,” 141.
- 14.
García Márquez, “Operación Carlota,” 146.
- 15.
Piero Gleijeses mentions that many of the soldiers in these earlier ventures in Africa were shocked when they found themselves in an all-Black battalion because it was nothing they had ever experienced before. At the beginning, only very dark Black Cubans were selected to go, and those deemed too light were rejected. However, as the Cubans gained more experience in Africa and realized that there were mulattos among the African guerrillas, they allowed lighter-skinned Cubans to participate. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions.
- 16.
García Márquez, “Operación Carlota,” 147.
- 17.
The “Special Period in Peacetime” was the name given to the decade or so immediately following the collapse of the USSR. Cuban gross domestic product, imports, and exports decreased dramatically, bringing severe food shortages and acute scarcity of even the most basic items, including soap, deodorant, and toilet paper. Cubans talk about it as an older American would talk about the Great Depression: it marked a generation.
- 18.
Guevara, African Dream.
- 19.
Other internationalist engagements have also drawn new attention. Nancy Alonso’s 2008 short-story collection includes two stories based on her experiences as an instructor during her two years in a Cuban civilian mission to Ethiopia. Alonso, Desencuentro.
- 20.
ICAIC is the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. The release of the third installation of the trilogy seems to have been complicated by the deaths of Rogelio París and Eduardo Moya in March and April 2016.
- 21.
Many Cubans speak in terms of Cuba’s underdevelopment, especially in relation to the US. But for this former soldier Cuba is “natural,” close to nature, not underdeveloped.
- 22.
Un muerto literally means “a dead person” but in this context refers to a spirit entity. Santería is a syncretic religion of African/Yoruba origin and Roman Catholicism practiced in Cuba and other parts of Latin America and, because of mass immigration, across the globe. It is also referred to as Regla de Ocha.
- 23.
This informant used the word “internationalism” when referring to public service work he has done after the hurricanes—perhaps because we were talking about internationalism. There is not a specific word for domestic public service, but typically it is referred to as trabajo voluntario (volunteer work), prestar servicio (lend service), or mano de obra extra (extra workforce).
- 24.
In 2000, five-year-old Elián González was found floating in an inner tube off the Florida coast, after his mother and other passengers who had left Cuba on a small boat perished in the crossing. His father in Cuba wanted his son back, while distant relatives in Miami wanted the boy to remain in their custody. Ultimately Attorney General Janet Reno ordered that Elián be taken by federal authorities from the relatives and reunited with his father. Opinion polls at the time showed that more Americans felt the boy should be reunited with his father than stay with relatives in the US.
- 25.
The Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place at Girón Beach, was an embarrassing defeat for the US, which had assumed incorrectly that the Cuban people would rise up against the revolutionary government upon the arrival of Cuban-exile invaders.
- 26.
As Edward George writes, “The question of how many casualties the Cubans suffered in Angola is the single most contentious issue of the Angolan operation.” George, Cuban Intervention, 162. Given that Cuban soldiers typically were not put in the front lines and were confined to barracks, it is possible that casualties were low. George, Cuban Intervention, 267. Other authors suggest figures ranging from 3,400 to a high of 12,000. See, respectively, Adams, “Race,” 292; and Hatzky, “Political Transfer,” 3.
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Almer, M. (2017). Cuban Narratives of War: Memories of Angola. In: Puri, S., Putnam, L. (eds) Caribbean Military Encounters. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58014-6_10
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