Pitt History post doc Jamie Miller writes in The Atlantic about the complex legacies of Cuban involvement in southern Africa. Here's an excerpt:
Castro in Africa: The contradictions of exporting revolution
For nearly three decades, Fidel Castro devoted vast amounts of Cuba’s limited resources to the project of exporting his revolution to Africa, even as it stuttered at home. As leader of Cuba, Castro advocated a radical departure from the prevailing post-war liberal internationalism, premised more on the ideas of Frantz Fanon than those of Adam Smith. Decolonization seemed to offer a prime laboratory for that vision. Cuba volunteered doctors, nurses, military advisers, and troops to support what Castro and Che Guevara saw as progressive regimes—“sister countr[ies],” in Havana’s terminology—in Algeria, Eastern Congo-Kinshasa (today’s Democratic Republic of Congo), Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, and, later, Ethiopia.
In the days since his death, and in parallel with obituaries detailing his record of violence and repression at home, Castro has been widely celebrated for his role in southern Africa in particular, a region where he supported Angolan revolutionaries pitted against the U.S.-backed apartheid regime of South Africa. And yet Cuba’s role on the continent also illuminates some of the contradictions of advancing an anti-imperial agenda, premised on social and racial justice, in part through the execution of proxy wars abroad.
... Then there was the unmissable irony at the heart of the whole policy: Havana made judgments about which third-world movements most resembled its model for the future, and then put its credibility in the hands of local leaders with their own priorities—similar to what Washington was doing at the same time.
But there was one big win. Cuba’s deeply improbable campaign in distant southern Africa was an important factor in the demise of apartheid, though it was not, as some claim, the dominant or decisive one. The South African system was imploding anyhow, as the Broederbond’s 1986 epiphany attests. But the war did accelerate a loss of white confidence in the regime and its apartheid model. Cuba’s campaign indirectly forced white voters and their family members to personally sacrifice in defense of apartheid—sacrifices they were, ultimately, unwilling to continue making.
