Cuito Cuanavale and the Break from Western Capitalist and Racist Domination : Africa Debt to Cuba

pambazuka.org · Feb 21, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Cuban PT-76 tank crew on routine security duties in Angola. Campbell explains how Cuban military and medical interventions have been decisive in the liberation of African peoples from colonial domination and poor health “The history of Africa will be written as that of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale”[1] Fidel Castro The government of the United States is attempting to crush the Cuban Revolution. This is an effort that has been undertaken since 1959 with invasions (Bay of Pigs), executions, sabotage, biological and chemical warfare, sanctions, blockades, trade embargoes and every possible measure that a government could undertake to overthrow a regime. These projects failed. The Cuban independence project survived. In 2026, in the aftermath of the capture of the President of Venezuela, and the blocking of free travel across the Caribbean, it is now being said that the Venezuela operation was but a dress rehearsal for the removal of the Cuban government. This is the moment when people around the world are calling for recognition of the debt owed to the Cuban people for their struggle to uphold the principles of independence and self-determination. This intervention calls for support for the Cuban people while reminding us of their role in challenging the myths of white supremacy and the supposed superiority of the capitalist system. The Cuban commitment to self-determination was forged through independence struggles in the 19th century and has been sustained ever since, all while living ninety miles from the United States. This history means the Cuban people carry concrete, lived experience in resisting colonial and neocolonial domination. In this period of profound trials for Cuba, it is essential that we join with others in reminding the world of what Africans owe them. Over the course of the international struggles to defeat apartheid, Cuba dispatched more than 337,000 soldiers and 43,000 civilians to defend the Angolan people against a regime that represented the most extreme expression of white racist power. The 1988 victory at Cuito Cuanavale marked a seismic turning point in African and world history, delivering a decisive strategic blow to apartheid and announcing in unmistakable terms that the liberation of southern Africa could not be reversed. By halting the South African Defence Force (SADF), the combined Angolan and Cuban forces shattered the long-standing myth of Pretoria's military invincibility. This battlefield triumph fundamentally altered the region's political landscape, forcing the South African government to abandon its military ambitions and engage in the diplomatic negotiations that would eventually redraw the map of Southern Africa. The battle at Cuito Cuanavale was, up to that point, the largest military engagement on African soil since World War II and the defeat of General Rommel at El Alamein in 1942. That battle was the turning point in the defeat of fascism, just as the victory at Cuito Cuanavale became a turning point for African independence and the opening of a new road toward social and economic transformation. Despite being driven out of Angola in defeat, most students across Africa know little or nothing of this extraordinary military and diplomatic battle. Every child in Europe learns in school about the struggles against fascism, yet in Africa the imperial counter-narrative has worked hard to obscure what actually happened. Apartheid apologists insisted that the South African army was never defeated, framing Pretoria's withdrawal as a voluntary retreat toward negotiation made possible by the approaching end of the Cold War. American pundits took the lead in advancing the idea that it was the United States that brokered peace in southern Africa and brought apartheid to its close.[2] The African National Congress (ANC) government has been complicit in this erasure. For the ANC leadership, teaching the truth about Cuito Cuanavale would undermine the myth that the ANC itself was the singular force that ended apartheid. It is this same evasiveness that explains why South Africa today is not taking the lead within BRICS to oppose the current U.S. blockade and the campaign to strangle the Cuban people economically. For the intellectual defenders of apartheid dominating the Universities and educational apparatus, the notion that white forces could be defeated in battle was and is simply inadmissible. For a brief period after the ANC came to power, the South African government hosted the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. This was a moment when the push for reparative justice was high on the global agenda. But as the post-apartheid project increasingly oriented itself around the promotion of Black capitalism and the rise of figures such as Patrice Motsepe, Jacob Zuma, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a virtual silence descended over the sacrifices made by the peoples of Southern Africa and Cuba in the struggle to end apartheid. To this author's knowledge, Ronnie Kasrils stands alone among former ANC liberation leaders in writing seriously about the significance of Cuito Cuanavale. Kasrils rightly described the battle as the "Stalingrad of Apartheid" — a decisive strategic defeat that forced the South African regime to concede Namibian independence and confront its own eventual demise. [3]The outcome directly accelerated Namibian independence and the broader process that led to the dismantling of apartheid and the formation of the African Union. Fidel Castro summed up the importance of this event when he stated that, “The history of Africa will be written as that of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale” Nelson Mandela noted that Cuito Cuanavale was a symbol. The battles at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa . . . Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.”[4] In this commentary we will deploy a fractal analysis of the break from recursive patterns of white supremacy that is represented by the struggles of the peoples of Africa and Cuba. Critical perspectives on the obsession of elements of the US ruling class in its opposition to the Cuban revolution highlight that the opposition to Cuba is often rooted in a White Supremacist framework that seeks to restore the pre-revolutionary racial and class hierarchies. If white supremacy matured over 400 years, it would be premature and reductive to claim that one battle could dismantle apartheid and racial capitalism entirely. In this commentary, we want to underline the importance of the indelible break from the enduring myth of white supremacy. Racial Capitalism and white supremacy had functioned as a fixed systemic constant, a recursive loop of perceived invincibility that dictated the "physics" of African geopolitics by rendering black resistance seemingly futile. The victory at Cuito Cuanavale acted as a definitive symmetry break, transforming a seemingly ‘eternal’ rule into a shattered variable and triggering a structural collapse of the entire apartheid system. As the progressive community rallies in solidarity with the Cuban people, this commentary invites the reader to consider ten interconnected episodes that together illuminate the depth and durability of the relationship between the Cuban revolutionary process and the peoples of Africa. These episodes are not discrete or isolated events. They constitute a cumulative historical architecture, each one building upon and reinforcing the others, tracing a continuous thread from the ideological foundations of anti-colonial thought through to the contemporary struggle against imperial strangulation. Taken together, they reveal the fractal logic of Cuban-African solidarity — a pattern of mutual commitment that repeats and deepens across different theatres, different decades, and different forms of struggle, culminating in a rupture from which there can be no return. The ten episodes are organized as follows: I. The Foundational Ideological Framework: Anti-Colonialism, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Revolutionary Internationalism. II. First Engagements: Algeria and Zanzibar in the Early 1960s. III. The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba and Its Global Reverberations: Victor Dreke and Che Guevara in the Congo, 1965. IV. Cuban Support for Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and the PAIGC, 1965–1974. V. Amilcar Cabral and the Weapon of Theory VI Angola: From Operation Carlota to Cuito Cuanavale, 1975– VII. Ethiopia and the Ogaden War: Solidarity Under Pressure. VIII. Medical Internationalism and the Long Arc of Revolutionary Care, 1963–2026: From Early Missions to Fighting Ebola and Biological Warfare. IX. Cultural and Educational Dimensions of Cuban African Solidarity. X. The Contemporary Conjuncture: Imperial Efforts to Strangulate Cuba and the New Point of No Return. We begin this reflection on Cuito Cuanavale and the historic break from the recursive logic of white supremacy with the idea of our common humanity, an idea that was forcefully placed on the historical agenda by the defeat of the apartheid army. The African philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, expressed in the foundational principle that a person is a person through other persons, provides the deepest grounding for this idea. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the great peace activists of the twentieth century who understood the indivisibility of that humanity. In his opposition to the war against the Vietnamese people, he warned that a nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. King recognized the possibility of a genuine break with the old mechanistic, atomistic, and deterministic paradigms that construct human beings as rational actors driven by competition, greed, and self-interested calculation. Ubuntu offers a cou