Cubans In Angola

Following independence from Portugal, the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), established a one-party, Marxist-Leninist state. Angola was officially a communist satellite from 1975 to 1992, with the country heavily aligned with the Soviet Union and Cuba, to whom much was owed.

How they got to this point was a civil war between pro-western forces and the communist insurgents, supplied with weapons by the Soviets and military expertise by the Cubans. South Africa recognized the Marxist threat and tried to intervene and the SADF rode in to help the nationalist, the “National Union for the Total Independence of Angola,” or UNITA, and the “National Front for the Liberation of Angola,” or FNLA. And here our story begins.

In the last week of October 1975, the South African Defense Force or SADF, was a military force unlike anything the MPLA, the Soviet-backed rebel organization, had ever faced. And the SADF was moving North along the Angolan coastal plain, leaving a trail of shattered communist rebel defenders in its wake.

The SADF moved under no flag. The men wore no identifying insignia. Their vehicles carried no

unit markings. Officially, the SADF did not exist to the outside world, nor to Pretoria itself, the administrative capital of South Africa. The SADF personnel had been ordered to pose as mercenaries, wearing an array of non-South African uniforms, and operating under strict deniability, but the men of Battle Group Zulu were very real, and they were moving fast under the command of a South African special forces officer, who had forged his combat instincts in the Rhodesian Bush War.

Battle Group Zulu was the Vanguard of “Operation Savannah,” covering 1,963 miles of Angolan territory in just 33 days, and engaging in 14 full scale battles and 21 skirmishes. To understand what made this advance so remarkable, and what made its eventual run into Cubans, an event so historically explosive, you have to understand the implications of Communist insurgencies in the African continent.

The South African government, had secretly initiated the operation, which was conceived, as a rapid intervention force to stop the Soviet backed MPLA from seizing power in Angola, before Independence Day, on November 11, of the same year. The CIA and the United States government were monitoring, alarmed at the prospect of a Marxist takeover of Angola, but still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam, were not willing to send in boots to prevent it.

The SADF was going in alone, with no back up. Battle Group Zulu consisted of a battalion of bushmen soldiers drawn from the Caprivi, or Mbarakwengo people, a distinct group of Bushmen, who have historically inhabited the lush, riverine woodlands of the Caprivi Strip, officially the Zambezi Region, in today’s northeastern Namibia, 1000 fighters from the National Front for the Liberation of Angola and white South Africans.

The Battle Group’s lethal edge was not numbers, but the quality of the men. BGZ was outnumbered at almost every engagement, but fire power, military discipline, speed, determination, and ability to adjust to changing circumstances, were its advantages. On the other hand, the communist MPLA‘s military wing, was a conventional Soviet equipped army, that fought from static defenses or fixed positions, and displayed predictable responses in time and strategy. Battle Group Zulu refused to play that game.

They moved at night. They hit the flanks. They kept the pressure relentlessly and advanced continuously. Town after town fell with stunning speed to the BGZ with the civilian population of each town, exhausted by months of factional violence, often greeting the column with something approaching relief. The Battle Group also realized that in several occasions, their arrival was greeted with jubilation by MPLA troops, who took their column for friendly forces, their confusion, a direct product of the deniability measures that had Zulu‘s men had taken in wearing mismatched uniforms and clothing with no unit identification.

But as they moved further North, the picture changed. Things were beginning to look different. The trenches were dug more deliberately. The fields of fire were better established, the resistance stiffer, and the whites in those positions, were not speaking Portuguese. November 1975, was the hinge point of the entire Angola intervention. It was the moment the Cold War turned hot, not in Berlin or Saigon, but on a red dust plateau in southern Angola, and almost nobody knew it was happening.

As the BGZ continued to advance, they ran into more Cubans acting as advisors in the trenches for the MPLA. These were not the elite special forces that Castro would later dispatch in his massive airlift named “Operation Carlota.” These were instructors from the Cuban Army. Men and women, who had been sent to Angola to train the rebels not to fight themselves, but with the BGZ advancement and the MPLA’s political future hanging in the balance, the Cubans had been forced into fighting positions alongside their students.

On 2nd and 3rd of November, the MPLA was unsuccessful in their attempt to stop the BGZ’s advance. But this encounter lead the BGZ commanders to conclude that their troops had faced the best organized opposition to date. The improvement in the enemies performance was undeniable. The positions were better prepared. The reaction times were faster. There was a professionalism to the resistance that the MPLA had never demonstrated anywhere down South.

Nonetheless, the South Africans punched through, but the battle left bodies on both sides and among the dead, and the captured, the truth was unavoidable. There were non-black professional troops with the MPLA and they were Cubans, even though, Havana was downplaying its involvement in Africa – Castro had not yet formally announced his military intervention.

But that fiction, had been physically torn open as the Cuban presence was irrefutable, not only among the casualties, but also in the improved defenses, the trenches were dug to a standard far beyond that of the MPLA’s. The mortar positions were mutually supporting, cross-fire machine gun positions had been established. Counter attacks were carried out. The Cubans didn’t let the MPLA rebels run away either. They would have shot them on the spot. For BGZ, it was the first time they had encountered anything resembling a professional military opposition.

Cubans in Angola. It was a geopolitical earthquake! South Africa had not simply stumbled into a civil conflict, it had walked into a proxy war with a competent foreign military backed by the Soviet Union, and the first Cubans in SADF’s hands, were about to detonate a political crisis that would echo from Pretoria to Washington to Havana.

By this time, the Cubans had become painfully aware of South Africa’s intentions. On November 4, Castro decided to begin an intervention of his own and on an unprecedented scale, “Operation Carlota.” That same day, the first aircraft carrying 100 heavy weapon specialists left for Angola, arriving on November 7. On November 9, the first 100 men from a 652 strong contingent of elite special forces, were flown in.

Castro’s decision in Havana would ultimately stop the entire South African advance. Battle Group Zulu did not pause to contemplate the geopolitical implications of what it had found. It kept moving. The clock was running out. Independence Day November 11, 1975 was the hard deadline and Luanda, the Capital of Angola, was still hundreds of kilometers to the north. But the advance now face something different. Not only a competent Cuban advised defense but Cuban manned defenses with properly integrated anti-armor positions and preplanned kill zones.

Crossing rivers was now virtually impossible. Cuban special forces had arrived only days before but had quickly assessed the terrain and had destroyed key bridges crossing the Rivers. Cuban combat engineers had insured that BGZ‘s anticipated route northward was compromised in ways the forward scouts could not detect until too late. The advanced stalled.

The Cold War‘s logic was asserting itself through charges of high explosives placed on river crossings and in the Angolan bush. The strategic picture was deteriorating rapidly with reinforcements from Cuba, arriving every other day. BGZ, was now facing, increasingly stronger resistance. The Cubans BGZ had first encountered, were few in numbers but competent enough. But now, the trenches were being manned by Cuban infantry in  battalion strength. Cuba was air lifting troops in a logistical operation that dwarfed anything the CIA or the SADF had anticipated.

The political ground beneath the entire operation was also changing. The Clark Amendment, passed by the US. Congress, was cutting off CIA funding to UNITA and the FNLA. South Africa’s partners were disappearing. The United Nations, loaded with Communists sympathizers, was moving toward recognizing the MPLA as a government.

The SADF was increasingly exposed politically and military, on a 1,900 mile front that it could not hold with the forces available. In the face of regional and International condemnation, the SADF made the decision around Christmas of 1975, to begin withdrawing from Angola. The organized withdrawal commenced in February 1976, and formally ended a month later.

The Cuban prisoners and bodies recovered by the BGZ, between late October and mid November of 1975, were never publicly acknowledged by Pretoria, because that was the nature of a covert war. The South African government could not trumpet the capture of Cuban soldiers without admitting that its own men, had been in Angola. The deniability that had sent  BGZ north wearing generic uniforms, now imprisoned the story of what that column had found in Angola.

The tangible evidence that South Africa had not marched into a civil conflict, but rather, into a proxy war engineered in Moscow and managed by Havana, was never presented. The Cubans presence in Angola was classified. Operation Savannah was declared officially a strategic failure even though, men of BGZ, had advanced almost 2000 miles in just 33 days. They had fought through 14 full scale engagements. They had shattered every defensive line they encountered and captured two of Angola’s most significant port cities, and they had done it, while identifying, engaging and capturing soldiers of a foreign military power that was not supposed to be there. The proof was in blood and prisoners. Cuban intervention in Angola was not advisory, but active, not limited, but escalating. Soviet Marxism was taking a foot hold on African soil.

But all was not lost. Battle Group Zulu formed the basis of South Africa’s famous 32nd battalion, the Buffalo battalion, the most decorated unit in SADF history. The 32nd was to be the fighting formation that would spend the next 15 years operating precisely in the very Angolan Bush, that the BGZ had first penetrated. The men who trained those Buffalo soldiers, had learned their doctrine on the anvil of Operation Savannah, in combat operations against opponents who turned out to be Cuban soldiers, embedded in a force, that would not have lasted a week without them.

The first Cuban soldier captured in Angola were not trophies. They were a warning of the scale of what Cuba and the Soviet Union intended in southern Africa, of the years of conflict that lay ahead, of the price that would be paid in blood and treasure for the next decade and a half. Battle Group Zulu had seen it first. They had the prisoners to prove it, and for too long, the world was not allowed to know. And eventually, the world knew, but it didn’t care.