[allAfrica.com] Fidel Castro, Carlos Cardoso and the Battle for Angola Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo) ANALYSIS December 6, 2005 Posted to the web December 6, 2005 By Paul Favet Maputo Cuban President Fidel Castro has at last given a fairly detailed account of the largest conventional battle ever fought in southern Africa - the Angolan-Cuban defence of the town of Cuito Cuanavale against invading South African forces in 1987-88. This is of particular interest to AIM, since our director at the time, the late Carlos Cardoso, was one of the few foreign journalists in Angola at the crucial moment. With excellent access to Angolan and Cuban military sources, Cardoso gave a blow by blow account of the unfolding battle for Cuito Cuanavale. Translated into English, Cardoso's dispatches were sent round the world - particularly to the South African media, much to the anger of apartheid Defence Minister Magnus Malan. As more details become available of the drama of those months in southern Angola, it is clear that Cardoso's reporting (even though he was never able to visit the Cuito Cuanavale battlefront) was extraordinarily accurate. Castro's speech on the Cuban involvement, delivered last Friday, the commemorative day of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), puts the number of Cuban troops involved in the defence of Cuito Cuanavale, and the ensuing counter-offensive, at 55,000 - considerably more than the 36,000 who helped save Angola from the joint invasions by South Africa and Zaire at the time of the country's independence in 1975. The confrontation began with an ill-advised offensive by the Angolan army, FAPLA, against bases of the apartheid-backed rebel movement, UNITA, in the far south-east. Castro confirmed a detail that Cardoso had been the first to report - the Cubans advised against this offensive. But (a point not made by Castro) Soviet military advisers supported it. The South African army intervened in September 1987, and FAPLA suffered a massive defeat at the Lomba river, losing much of its hardware. The Angolan troops pulled back to Cuito Cuanavale, which possessed a major air base. The Angolan government, faced with what Castro described as a major disaster "in a military operation for which we bore no responsibility", sent urgent messages to Havana seeking assistance. And Cuba responded, repeating the air and sea lift of 1975, on an even larger scale. Military units, Castro said, "crossed the Atlantic rapidly, landing on the southern coast of Angola to attack from the south-west in the direction of Namibia, while 800 kilometres to the east special units advanced to Cuito Cuanavale". There the Cuban/Angolan forces prepared "a lethal trap" for the advancing South African forces. Cardoso was the first journalist to announce the arrival of the Cuban reinforcements. His dispatch of 5 December 1987, confirming that the Cubans were back in the war in force, must be regarded as one of the greatest scoops of his career. Predictably, this drew a sneering response from Magnus Malan, who claimed that the Cubans were not "real fighters", and that Cardoso was a mere propagandist. Much worse was a second denial - the Deputy Angolan Foreign Minister Venancio de Moura went on the BBC to deny that there were any Cuban reinforcements, or that the Cubans were rapidly advancing southwards. This denial caused some nervousness in the Mozambican Information Ministry. Did Cardoso really know what he was talking about ? Was it a good idea for AIM to reveal matters that the Angolan government would rather keep quiet about ? Cardoso did not retract a word: in his notes, he scribbled. "There are new Cuban troops in Angola. It's a fact, it's true, and a journalist has the duty to tell the truth, particularly when it's as simple as this". In the following months, there were several more Angolan protests against Cardoso's reporting. For even when he had returned to Maputo, Cardoso continued to contact his sources in Angola, and write about the war. At one point the official Angolan news agency, ANGOP, even threatened to cut its ties with AIM. In the context of Castro's speech, these protests look even more absurd than they did at the time. Castro confirmed that, as reported by Cardoso (and also by Yugoslav journalist Nikola Vadjon), Cuban and Angolan forces did indeed advance towards the Namibian border. He gave the numbers that Cardoso did not have available: this counter-offensive involved 40,000 Cuban troops, 30,000 Angolans "supported by approximately 600 tanks, hundreds of artillery pieces, 1,000 anti-aircraft batteries, and the audacious MiG-23 units which took control of the skies". The South Africans had lost their aerial supremacy, and faced the very real threat of a Cuban/Angolan thrust into occupied Namibia. For Cardoso, this was the turning point. At Cuito Cuanavale apartheid had been militarily defeated, and it was this, rather than changes in the Soviet Union, or the diplomacy of the United States, that finally forced Pretoria to accept Namibian independence. "South Africa agreed to negotiate and signed the agreement on Namibian independence, because it couldn't do anything else", Cardoso wrote. Apparently Fidel Castro agrees. "The mighty victories at Cuito Cuanavale, and particularly the advance of the powerful force of Cuban troops in southwest Angola put a full stop to the foreign aggression", he said on Friday. "The enemy had to swallow his habitual arrogance and sit at the negotiating table". The result was the New York agreement of December 1988, signed by Angola, Cuba and South Africa, on Namibian independence and the withdrawal of Cuban forces. Castro recalled that the United States had never wanted Cuba to participate in such negotiations. But "given the seriousness of the military situation faced by the South African aggressors, they had no option but to accept our presence". Cuba, Castro declared, had played "a decisive role" in consolidating Angolan independence, and in obtaining Namibian independence. These blows were significant in the eventual "disappearance of the odious apartheid regime". He noted, accurately enough, that it is rare indeed for the winning side in a war to behave as modestly as the Cubans have done. For up until last Friday, the Cuban leadership had scarcely mentioned the key role of its armed forces at this decisive moment in southern African history. It is 30 years since the first Cuban expeditionary force, under the code-name "Operation Carlota", saved Angola from the South African and Zairian armies, and Castro has now decided to set the record straight, for fear that otherwise it will be wiped from memory. "That extraordinary epic (of 1975) has never been fully told", he said. "Coinciding with the 30th anniversary, yankee imperialism is making an enormous effort to ensure that the name of Cuba scarcely appears in the commemorative events. They're trying to rewrite history. It now seems that Cuba had absolutely nothing to do with the independence of Angola, of Namibia, and with the defeat of the previously invincible armed forces of apartheid". Castro has every right to be bitter. The official directives of the Angolan government on the commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the country's independence did not so much as mention the Cuban role. Cuba, Castro noted, was "the only non-African country that fought and shed its blood in support of Africa and against the shameful apartheid regime". The Cuban leader sent a not very coded message to the Angolan government about the way it is mishandling its oil reserves. "Currently yankee imperialism is extracting from Angola billions of dollars, is wasting its natural resources, and is exhausting its non-renewable oil reserves", he warned. Castro then made a long overdue promise - Cuba, he said, is willing to cooperate with researchers by "gradually opening its archives and documents to serious writers who want to tell the true story of those events". Carlos Cardoso would have approved. Were he still with us, he would doubtless have been the first to take up this offer.   =============================================================================   Copyright © 2005 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). =============================================================================