On the northern side, the FNLA advanced down towards Luanda with South African artillery support. However, on the morning of the decisive clash, FNLA leader Holden Roberto slept late and started the attack only after the MPLA defenders had had a chance to take up strong positions. Predictably, the attack was a dismal failure, and the South African leader element had to be evacuated by a navy frigate patrolling off the coast of Angola. The battery of 140-mm guns was later extricated via Zaire.[71] This was the end of the South African support for the FNLA.
And so independence day – 11 November – dawned, with the fighting preventing the planned elections from being held. At this point, having installed UNITA safely in its traditional home ground in southern Angola, the South African forces were supposed to withdraw. But it was clear that the job was not yet done and Operation Savannah was not yet over. At the request of the US, France, UNITA and the FLNA, the South African government extended its soldiers’ role. They now were ordered to continue the advance to an easily defendable position.[72]
However, the whole initiative was about to come unstuck. On 19 December, the US Senate passed the Clark Amendment, barring aid to groups engaged in military operations in Angola. The idea was to force the South African government to stop aiding the FNLA and UNITA. This sent out a powerful negative signal, although the US government still asked the South Africans to delay their withdrawal until the OAU had assembled in January 1976 for its annual summit in Addis Ababa. The Americans hoped that the OAU member states might decide to censure the Cubans for their intervention.[73]
To be sure, the OAU was split right down the middle, with 22 countries supporting a call for a government of national unity in Angola, in accordance with the Alvor Agreement, and 22 in favour of recognising the MPLA straight away as the country’s legitimate government. The OAU member countries’ disapproval of the white apartheid government was as intense as their fear of the communist states. The organisation’s chairman, President Idi Amin of Uganda, exercised his deciding vote and supported the MPLA.[74] Thus, the fact that the MPLA became the internationally recognised – and therefore legal – government of Angola was thanks to one of the most brutal dictators Africa has ever known.
With this, the rug was finally pulled out from under the South African government’s feet. Its international backing evaporated completely, and so the Cabinet decided to pull out a few days afterwards. Members of 35 Citizen Force units were called up and put into positions on the Angolan side of the border to block a possible Cuban invasion of South West Africa.[75] The South Africans kept a force of 4 000 to 5 000 men at the Calueque water supply dam, until the MPLA promised not to impede the flow of water to the north of SWA, which was dependent on the big dam. Then, by 27 March the last South African troops recrossed the border into SWA. Altogether, 29 of their comrades had been killed in action.[76]
Ominously, the Cubans moved to within striking distance of the South West African border. But Castro stopped there; South African fears that he might invade South West Africa were unfounded. As he explained in a speech in December 1988, “we had men, we had a good number of tanks and cannons, but we didn’t have planes or anti-aircraft rockets or much of the equipment we have today!”[77]
The Cuban question
Piero Gleijeses, the only academic ever to have been granted access to the Cuban archives, maintains that South Africa’s decision to invade Angola had nothing to do with any Cuban presence in the country, as Pretoria afterwards alleged. In fact, he says, things were the other way round: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s initiative to intervene in force was in reaction to the South African invasion.[78] Strictly speaking, he is quite correct but the argument loses its relevance when all the facts are taken into account.
Castro’s decision to start moving his main force of several thousand men was taken only on 5 November 1975, about two weeks after the South Africans crossed the border on 23 October. But Gleijeses is quite silent about the fact that, by 1974, the Cuba and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union) had already decided to aid their friends in the MPLA to attain sole power in Angola. The huge quantities of military equipment channelled to the MPLA from late 1974, a flow that accelerated in March 1975, and the hundreds of Soviet and Cuban instructors and military advisors who were sent to Angola, tell their own story.[79] Soviet aid to the MPLA was duly noted in an SADF report, dated 26 April 1975, to PW Botha. It was recommended that South Africa should try to bring the FNLA and UNITA together in an anti-communist alliance.[80] Military involvement was not on the agenda at this stage.
It is now known that the Soviet Union started its military aid to the MPLA in early December 1974, long before the South African involvement was even a glint in PW Botha’s eye.[81] Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister, Carlos Rafael Rodrigues, admitted to journalists in January 1976 that 238 military instructors had been sent to Angola in May 1975 to train MPLA fighters – months before the South Africans even entertained the thought of intervening. These were followed by another 200 instructors in August, as well as 1 000 combat troops, armoured cars and trucks aboard three ships, which docked on 4, 5 and 12 October, also well before the South African intervention.[82] The fact that Castro sent the bulk of his army only after the South African invasion cannot alter these facts.
Even Colin Legum, an academic and journalist who is not known for his sympathy with the National Party government, called the assertion that the Cuban intervention was a reaction to the South African invasion “clearly a post facto rationalisation”.[83]
In a lengthy secret analysis of the Soviet and Cuban involvement in Angola, the CIA’s conclusion was that the large-scale military aid coming from the Soviet Union in early 1975 – the report refers to an “escalation of Soviet support” involving “tanks and large mortars” – was not in response to the small amount of aid the FNLA had been getting from China and the US itself. Because the escalation came at a time of relative 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]