National Security Archive Update, April 1, 2002
*SECRET CUBAN DOCUMENTS ON HISTORY OF AFRICA INVOLVEMENT POSTED*
NEW BOOK based on Unprecedented Access to Cuban Records; True story of U.S.-Cuba Cold War clash in Angola presented in "Conflicting Missions"
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB67/
Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today posted a selection of secret Cuban government documents detailing Cuba's policy and involvement in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. The records are a sample of dozens of internal reports, memorandum and communications obtained by Piero Gleijeses, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, for his new book, "Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-1976" (The University of North Carolina Press).
Peter Kornbluh, director of the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project, called the publication of the documents "a significant step toward a fuller understanding Cuba's place in the history of Africa and the Cold War," and commended the Castro government's decision to makes its long-secret archives accessible to scholars like Professor Gleijeses. "Cuba has been an important actor on the stage of foreign affairs," he said. "Cuban documents are a missing link in fostering an understanding of numerous international episodes of the past."
Professor Gleijeses is the first scholar to gain access to closed Cuban archives-a process that took more than six years of research trips to Cuba-including those of the Communist Party Central Committee, the armed forces, and the foreign ministry. Classified Cuban documents used in the book include: minutes of meetings with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara's handwritten correspondence from Zaire, military directives from Defense Minister Raul Castro, briefings from Cuban intelligence chieftain Manuel Piniero, field commander reports, internal Cuban government memoranda, and Cuban-Soviet communications and military accords.
The Archive also posted an interview Gleijeses conducted for the book with Robert Hultslander - the former CIA station chief in Luanda who spoke on the record for the first time about events in Angola. "I was deeply concerned," Hultslander stated about the forces of the Jonas Savimbi, the CIA backed rebel chief recently killed in Angola, "about UNITA's purported ties with South Africa, and the resulting political liability such carried. I was unaware at the time, of course, that the U.S. would eventually beg South Africa to directly intervene to pull its chestnuts out of the fire." Hultslander also told Gleijeses that he had disagreed with Henry Kissinger's approach to the Angola conflict. "History has shown," Hultslander noted, "that Kissinger's policy on Africa itself was shortsighted and flawed."
The book provides the first comprehensive history of the Cuba's role in Africa and settles a longstanding controversy over why and when Fidel Castro decided to intervene in Angola in 1975.
A sample of the Cuban records, along with several declassified U.S. documents on Cuba and Africa, can be viewed on the National Security Archive website:
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