Cuban forces pre-Twilight War

[Olefin]

This article is from the Atlantic magazine and gives an idea of how widespread Cuba's forces were in Africa and other places during the last years of the Cold War - I used this as part of my research for the East African Sourcebook for the size of the Cuban forces and where they were deployed. Its a good source for GM's playing in Africa and elsewhere if you are thinking of integrating Cubans into your campaign (i.e. outsided of Gateway to the Spanish Main)

Enjoy - fyi article was from August 1988

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...achine/305932/

by John Hoyt Williams

The rapid Cuban buildup enabled the Marxist MPLA (the Angolan Popular Liberation Movement) to retain much of the nation, blunting the Savimbi offensive and discouraging South African participation-not bad results for a Caribbean Island nation. By 1977 almost 20,000 Cuban soldiers, half of them reservists, held the balance of power in Angola, and though they could not rout UNITA, they had clearly achieved their internationalist goal.

Castro's regiments saw only sporadic combat from 1977 to 1983, but their number continued to grow, stabilizing at 30,000-35,000 men and then swelling to 45,000, the level maintained today. In 1983 the majority of the Cuban combat units were encamped around Luanda, the capital; those in the field, however, were handled roughly by Savimbi, and in 1984 several thousand men died in large-scale clashes with the rebels. Since those bloody encounters, and owing in part to falling morale among MPLA conscripts, reportedly the Cuban military is beginning to replace Angolan military units in the battlefields of the south. Unfortunately for Cuba's minuscule (and declining) hard-currency reserves, the war-ravaged economy of Angola is drying up as a source of income. Some 3,000 East Germans and 1,500 Russians are also in Angola, but these men run the railroads, manage the economic infrastructure, and advise the Angolan Army and security forces. The Cubans do the fighting and the dying.

A number of elements have recently led to disillusionment within Cuba regarding the Angolan venture. One of these is race. Roughly 50 percent of the Cubans serving in Angola are blacks. Is this because almost all Angolans are black? Some Cubans wonder. So do some outsiders. The former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who spent time in Cuba as a fugitive, wrote despairingly as far back as 1976 that Castro had long displayed a habit of "shipping out to foreign wars the militant young black officers as a safety valve on the domestic scene," asserting that "as Africa runs out of wars of liberation, Fidel Castro runs out of dumping grounds" for his nation's large black minority. Even Cleaver, however, did not foresee that Castro would find a continuing, counterrevolutionary employment for his legions.

Another source of disillusionment is the fact that most Cubans killed in Angola-perhaps 5,000 since 1975-are not returned home but are buried where they fell (the same is true for those killed elsewhere in Africa). Castro, who admits that more than 400,000 Cubans have served in Angola, never alludes to casualty figures. Once, when asked directly, he responded that he never mentions the subject because "the enemy must not have that information."

The fact that a high proportion of the regiments sent to Angola are reserve units is also a potential source of conflict on the island. The members of these units have already completed their three years of arduous, spartan military service and have been hoping to do only forty-five days or so of annual training stints. A reservist who does not object to defending the beaches of his own nation against a foreign invader may question being asked to fight and die thousands of miles from home for what his leaders consider a matter of ideology and personal pride. Very probably a high proportion of the roughly 30,000 young Cubans imprisoned for refusing military service or Angolan duty are reservists. In January of 1985 one thoroughly disillusioned lieutenant colonel, Mourino Perez, the coordinator of Cuba’s African operations, defected to the West, saying he was “tired of burying Cuban soldiers in Africa.”

Yet another source of discontent is that Fidel Castro and his brother Raul (the Minister of Defense and Castro’s deputy in all other positions) use Angola as punishment duty for recalcitrants. A case in point is Colonel Pedro Tortolo, who was the commander of Cuban military personnel on Grenada when the U.S. forces invaded. Tortolo was ostentatiously court-martialed and sent to Angola as a private, along with most of his Grenada command.

In Cuba today the veterans of Angolan service are commonly referred to as the “generation of disenchantment,” and they regard themselves much the way that Vietnam veterans did in the United States in the 1970’s. The disenchantment is likely to grow in significance, because Castro shows no signs of wishing to disengage. The Angolan President, José Eduardo dos Santos, may well resolve the problem for him, however, because, according to the influential Jane's Defence Weekly, the Angolan leader is upset with the Cuban Army's "success rate" against Savimbi and is negotiating with Kim Il Sung to replace the Cubans with North Koreans.

In 1977 another cry for help reached Havana from Africa. This time it was from Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the besieged Marxist ruler of Ethiopia. His regime was under growing pressure-indeed, invasion- from neighboring Somalia, beset by anti-Communist rebels at home, and facing a serious secessionist movement in Eritrea province. Castro, despite his substantial commitment in Angola, rushed a dozen regiments to Addis Ababa, and these disciplined forces undoubtedly turned the tide and saved the fraternal Mengistu regime.

At its peak, in 1978 and 1979, the Cuban expeditionary force in Ethiopia consisted of some 24,000 fighting men, and about 11,000 are still there today, mostly in garrison duty. The Cubans did repulse the Somalis, they did help erase internal guerrilla bands, but they did not-and will not-resolve the Eritrean imbroglio. (See "The Loneliest War," July, 1988, Atlantic, for more on Eritrea.)

Cuban troops and military and civilian security advisers are sprinkled liberally about the African continent-a continent, incidentally, with which Cuba conducts virtually no trade. In fact, as one scholar has noted, "since 1975 Third World countries have accounted for only 4-7 percent of total Cuban trade." According to well-informed sources, some 2,500 civilian and military advisers serve in Mozambique, where the leftist regime is threatened by anti-Communist RENAMO rebels. Another hundred advisers serve in the Congo; a handful are in São Tome e Principe and Equatorial Guinea; and the tiny homeland-state of Lesotho, in South Africa, has a token seven Cuban advisers. Cuban civilian advisers (some security-related) play important roles in Benin, Malagasay, and Guinea-Bissau. In the Arab world some 3,000 can be found in Libya and Algeria, among other things training terrorists and Polisario guerrillas. Cubans serve in Iraq; South Yemen continues to rely on Cuban and Soviet advisers; and Havana also posts units to Syria and Afghanistan. At least modest contingents have been posted to a number of Southeast Asian countries as well.

In this hemisphere, in addition to various guerrilla movements that have received not-so-covert Cuban aid, and Colonel Tortoló's abortive mission in Grenada, the Nicaraguan military buildup has been guided and shaped by Castro's legions. Some 4,500 Cubans are in the country, including large contingents of military and security personnel. According to a 1985 issue of The Economist, the military and civilian personnel sent to Nicaragua from Cuba are kept busy "teaching the locals how to spell revolución and load Kalashnikovs."