Eritrea Is Not for Cubans

By Karen De Young June 22, 1978

The Cuban government is determined, on both political and ideological grounds, to avoid direct military involvement in Ethiopia's war against Eritrean secessionists, authoritative sources here have indicated.
In a series of conversations, apparently seeking to convey in private what they have not said publicly, the high-level sources said that Cuba would resist Ethiopian pressure to commit its troops to Ethiopia's 17-year-old civil war, and would continue to push for a political solution to the conflict.
According to U.S. estimates, more than 15,000 Cuban soldiers remain stationed in Ethiopia after helping to win a border war against Somalia earlier this year.
Despite repeated objections from the United States and other Western nations to the continued Cuban presence, and strong expressions of concern that the troops would be deployed on Ethiopia's other, internal front, Cuba has refused to commit itself publicly either to withdrawal or to noninvolvement in Eritrea.
The possibility of Cuban troop deployment in Eritrea has also angered many of Cuba's Friends in the Third World, particularly militant Arab nations that support the Eritrean movement.
Just yesterday Iraq, the Soviet Union's closest ally in the Middle East, raised the stakes for Soviet-Cuban involvement in Eritrea. Iraqi Information Minister Saad Qasim Hammudi said in an interview that Baghdad, because of its support for the Eritrean cause, would not allow supply planes bound for Ethiopia to use Iraqi air space Readmore

Castro Seen Undecided On Cuban Role in Eritrea

By Murrey Marder April 28, 1978

Cuban President Fidel Castro and Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam engaged in an unusual public coloquy at a Havana rally Wednesday night over the Cuban military role in Afria.
Outwardly, Mengistu, a lieutenant colonel who is chairman of the Marxist Ethiopian Provisional Military Administrative Council, was paying tribute to Cuba's combat support in driving Somali invaders from Ethiopia's Ogaden region last month. Castro was basking in the praise.
But Cstro and Mengistu were also virtually debating, between the lines of their public remarks, whether Cuban troops should be drawn into the remaining and older war in Ethiopia against the secessionist province of Eritrea. This is one of the most difficult choices Cuba has faced in the projection of its military power into Africa, in coordination with the Soviet Union.
Diplomatic strategists in Washington and other capitals yesterday were amining monitored broadcasts of public remarks by Castro and Mengistu for clues to the private discussion underlying their speeches before an estimated million people in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion.
A Carter administration official concluded yesterday, "Mengistu is trying to get his hooks in a little deeper. But Castro is standing pat."
Mengistu ended his week-long visit to Cuba yesterday without indicating whether he had obtained Cuba's agreement use its American estimated 17,000 military personnel in Ethiopia for the Eritrean conflict. As far as is known, Cuba until now has permitted only some military advisers, and reportedly a few of its pilots, to join in the gangled Eritrean conflict, State Department sources said yesterday.
State Department press spokesman Hodding Carter III said "we do not know" the extent of Cuban military involvement in Eritrea "beyond some indications that Cuban pilots have flown combat missions in Eritrea." On Wednesday an Eritrea "beyond some indications that Cuban pilots have flown combat missions in Eritrean Liberation Front broadcast claimed that Cubans were playing a "major role" in carrying out bombing sorties against "liberated" zones of Eritrea.
Ethiopia is believed to be attempting to mount its major seasonal offensive against the Eritrean secessionists. It would use greater power than in past failures, employing some of the estimated billion dollars of Soviet military equipment it has received in the past year, plus Soviet Cuban military advice and Cuban troops - if it can get them.
In the judgment of American analysts, Castro laid out at Wednesday night's Havana rally, a rationale "that could permit him to go either way - leaving his options open." Until recently, Cuba, which is in the awkward position of having trained some of the Eriteam liberation forces, described Eritrea as an internal Ethiopian problem.
Following the defeat of the agressors against the Ogaden," Castro said in introducing Mengistu, "imperialism and its reactionary allies madly demand the immediate withdrawal of Cuban combatants in Ethiopia."
"Anyone can understand," he said, "that this also means the immediate initiation of new acts of agression. We, as a matter of Principle, emphatically refuse to discuss with the United States this point or any other point concerning Cuba's solidarity with the just struggles of the peoples of Africa."readmore

Cuba in Africa: A Forgotten History

During the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, members of the United States press were surprised when President Obama was photographed shaking the hand of Cuba’s President Raul Castro. The handshake, which was purely formal and ceremonial, did not have any meaning beyond what the protocol for such occasions demands. In 2000 President Bill Clinton shook the hand of President Fidel Castro which also led to all sorts of idle speculation about the meaning of that gesture. Unfortunately, there is a blind spot in the U.S. media and a terrible lack of understanding of the context of the historical relationship between the United States and Cuba. Readmore

Fidel Castro’s anti-colonialist legacy

Cuba in Africa
Castro’s (and Guevara’s) role in assisting the decolonisation process in Africa was second to none. From the early 1960s, Castro threw all his support behind the Algerian liberation struggle against France.
Cuban doctors and soldiers were some of the first to arrive in Algeria to offer a hand to the independence forces fighting to push French colonialism out of their country.
In the following years, that support increased in size and scope across the continent. Castro offered Cuban support to the liberation struggles in Mozambique, Namibia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Guinea-Bissau, and Angola, among many others.
In some cases, this support involved military interventions that did not always go according to plan. For example, in the mid-1970s after Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by the Derg regime, Castro was forced to change sides – as the Soviets, East Germans, Czechs, and Americans also did – during a realignment of forces in the region provoked by ongoing disputes between Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Cuban personnel were required to abandon their former ally Mohammed Siad Barre, the Somali president, who now sided with the Americans, and take sides with their new ally Mengistu Haile Mariam. Cuban troops fought the Somalian invasion of the Ogaden alongside Ethiopian forces, and by remaining in Ethiopia gave at least tacit support to Ethiopian campaigns against Eritrean guerrillas fighting for independence.
This position almost certainly became a political dilemma for Castro, who until then had always supported anti-colonial movements of liberation across the world.
While Castro’s intervention in the Horn of Africa was characterised by dubious decisions and tainted by the purges that Mengistu’s regime would eventually carry out between 1977 and 1978, his involvement in the Angolan war is the outstanding episode in his career as a champion of decolonisation.

Not only did he demonstrate to the world that Cuba was far from being a pet project of the USSR – Cuba’s support for the socialist MPLA was done without the approval of the Kremlin and almost certainly against its wishes. It also helped raise his profile, and that of Cuba, to new levels of recognition and influence throughout the developing world. readmore