calm, it could also not be seen “as a response to the immediate battlefield needs of the MPLA”. Rather, the Soviet build-up “reflected a decision by the Soviets to try to give their faction in Angola the wherewithal to achieve military dominance”. This came about at a stage when the USSR, Cuba and the MPLA all “considered South African intervention unlikely”.[84]
Castro’s thinking was explained by Brigadier General Rafael del Pino, of the Cuban air force, who defected to the West in 1987. Del Pino was ordered by the Cuban leader in January 1975 to begin preparations for air force involvement. “Castro assumed that the Alvor Accord was going to be honoured by no one, and he wanted to get ahead of the field; he knew that the Chinese and North Koreans were giving aid to the FNLA. The arrangement was that the Soviet Union would send the weapons to Angola and Cuba would send the personnel.”[85]
According to another Cuban defector, Juan Benemelis (who at the time was head of the Africa department of the Cuban Foreign Ministry), the first contingent of Cuban instructors reached Angola in March 1975 – months before the South African intervention.[86] Somewhat later, Castro himself admitted, in a secret conversation with Todor Zhivkov, that he had sent arms for 14 000 to 15 000 MPLA fighters in September.[87] On 15 August, he proposed to Moscow that he send Cuban troops to Angola, and requested Soviet logistical help. However, the Soviets did not consider the time to be opportune.[88]
This gives the lie to Cuban propaganda, eagerly disseminated by Gleijeses, that the presence of Cuban troops in Angola was “a legal act”, as they “were in Angola at the invitation of the government”.[89] When the Cubans intervened, first on a limited scale, and then in earnest in early November, this was done at the request, not of an internationally recognised legal government, but of only one of three rebel movements. One could reason that South Africa had no business invading Angola either, but that still does not legitimise the Cuban and Soviet intervention.
The Cuban intervention rested on three factors. The first was Castro’s extraordinary ideological worldview. Angola held out little economic or strategic advantage for Cuba itself. But Castro was a true Marxist-Leninist idealist. The liberation struggle (presumably going hand in hand with a socialist revolution) was “the most moral thing in existence”, he told East German leader Erich Honecker in 1977. “If the socialist states take the right positions, they could gain a lot of influence. Here is where we can strike heavy blows against the imperialists.”[90] And a few weeks later he told a French magazine that Africa was “imperialism’s weakest link today . . . If we are militant revolutionaries, we must support the anti-imperialist, antiracist and anticolonialist struggle. Today, Africa has gained great importance. Imperialist domination is not as strong here as it is in Latin America.”[91]
Secondly, viewed as a deed of power politics, it came at exactly the right time. The US had been demoralised by its humiliating defeat in Vietnam and was not able to act strongly against the Cubans and Soviets. Castro, with his keen political instinct, surely realised this. And, in the third place, his chief opponent in Angola was the widely discredited apartheid regime of South Africa. This gave Cuba extra credibility in the eyes of the Third World.
The political consequences
The historical significance of Operation Savannah lies in the patterns it established, patterns that continued to dog the Border War until peace came in 1989. The first of these was that the Cubans proved themselves to be absolute masters of propaganda. Castro immediately launched a huge propaganda offensive, briefing a left-wing Colombian journalist, Gabriel García Márquez, to write an account of Operation Carlota, as the Cuban operation was named.[92] Márquez portrayed the campaign as a huge military triumph for the Cuban army and the MPLA and as a humiliating defeat for the hitherto invincible SADF.
The SADF itself generated a manuscript with a large part of the story, but, in spite of Magnus Malan’s support, it was shot down by PW Botha. A British journalist, Robert Moss, produced a more balanced analysis based on the SADF manuscript,[93] but the damage was done – Castro got his blow in first. The fact that the South African government had at first denied the presence of South African troops in Angola did not help its cause. In the eyes of most of the world – including the black populations of SWA and South Africa – these lies destroyed what little credibility Pretoria had. The result was that Castro was widely believed and Botha not.
In actual fact, though, at a tactical level the South Africans performed well. They lost one fight against the Cubans – at Ebo – but won several more. Operationally, they did astoundingly well with the blistering pace of their northward advance. On the levels of military and security strategy, they lost badly due to the changing political situation, over which they had no control. They pulled out, not having been defeated militarily (as Gleijeses asserts),[94] but because they had lost the political fight. But propaganda often has little to do with the facts.
What was true, however, was that South Africa’s prestige had been severely dented. Colin Legum pointed out at the time that this had been the first time since 1943 that “the South African Army had been committed to fight in an African war”, in which “for the first time in their modern history white South African soldiers ended up as prisoners of war in African hands”.[95] A perception took root in Africa that the mighty Boers could be beaten on the battlefield. Castro himself told Todor Zhivkov a few weeks later that “the myth of South Africa” had been exposed. South Africa “is something like Israel in Southern Africa”, he said.[96]
Castro’s propaganda was also good news to the banned African National Congress (ANC). Its mouthpiece, Sechaba, spoke of “wide-spread fear and panic amongst the white population and the racist ruling clique”. Thus, “the boast that the South African Army could not be beaten has become a mere propaganda nonsense”.[97]
A second pattern that emerged was that the two opposing sides (Cuba and its allies on the one side and South Africa on the other) completely misunderstood each other’s motivation and objectives. At the time Castro decided to counter the South African invasion with Operation Carlota, Piero Gleijeses was told by Jorge Risquet Valdés, a senior Cuban official, Castro was convinced that the South Africans wanted to take Luanda itself.[98] Years later, Castro told his biographer: “The objective was for the racist South African forces coming from the south to meet up with [Zairean president] Mobutu’s mercenaries from the north and occupy Luanda before Angola proclaimed its independence . . .”.[99]
It is only human to ascribe the basest motives to your enemies, and this undoubtedly played a role in the Cuban exaggeration of the South African objectives. But it also had a practical propagandistic effect. When you want to add credibility to your own claims, it helps to make the enemy seem stronger than he really is and to exaggerate his objectives. When analysing the Cuban propaganda victory, this is something to take into account.
According to military historian Sophia du Preez, who had access to all the relevant SADF documents, the capture of Luanda was indeed discussed in South African military circles, but realism prevailed. It was decided that the resources needed for such an operation, and the likely price that would be paid, would be too great and the advantages too small.[100] The Cabinet was advised that a force of 1 500 soldiers would be needed to take Luanda, while casualties were expected to be as high as 40%, which was totally unacceptable.[101]
On the other hand, the South Africans (and the Americans) also misunderstood the Cuban position. For years, both countries would refer in their secret documents to the Cubans as “Soviet surrogate forces”. They thought that Castro was simply a puppet dancing on a Soviet string. Piero Gleijeses in general is very partial to Castro, and makes every effort to interpret South African actions in a negative light. But he makes a very convincing case that Castro’s decision to intervene in Angola was taken independently of Moscow.[102]
The Cuban intervention and advance towards the South West African border set the alarm bells ringing. There was a real fear in South African government circles that they would invade SWA.
