Mandela and Cuba: another memory hole // "One of Our Greatest Coups": The CIA & the Capture of Nelson Mandela
Recognition of the role of Cuba in aiding the ANC whilst the western powers backed apartheid is hardly serviceable in maintaining the conventional Cold War narrative. Hence the media's impressive avoidance of the context of the Castro-Obama handshake and its significance.
The media's careful avoidance of the contrasting Cold War roles of the United States and Cuba regarding South Africa is not of mere academic consequence. As George Orwell understood, control of historical narratives gives elites a powerful grip over public perceptions of present realities and grants those elites greater latitude in their future action... The belief that the United States plays an essentially benign role in world affairs depends in turn upon a highly distorted picture of the historical role of the United States.
The media's careful avoidance of the contrasting Cold War roles of the United States and Cuba regarding South Africa is not of mere academic consequence. As George Orwell understood, control of historical narratives gives elites a powerful grip over public perceptions of present realities and grants those elites greater latitude in their future action... The belief that the United States plays an essentially benign role in world affairs depends in turn upon a highly distorted picture of the historical role of the United States.
Since his death, western media commentary on the late Nelson Mandela has largely consisted of sanitized depictions of Mandela as a saintly, pacifistic,[i]latter day Gandhi[ii]. A bloodless “kumbaya figure” (in Seamus Milne's memorable words) whose political vision for South Africa extended little further than the extension of the South African franchise. In the days following his death Mandela was eulogised by the most unlikely figures – from those who directly aided the apartheid government, recent heads of state whose actions in the Middle East were harshly condemned by Mandela, to musicians who flouted the cultural boycott of South Africa and politicians recently engaged in efforts to disenfranchise black Americans. Mandela's famous talent (overplayed and uprooted from its strategic context) for forgiveness[iii] has been so effectively exploited by media commentators that the commemoration of his death has become a sort of ethical bath for the rich and powerful in which past sins and inconvenient facts are washed away.
Left critique of the mainstream media's typically atrocious performance has largely centred on the hypocrisy of the media's relaying of unquestioned protestations of admiration for Mandela from those political leaders (past and present) of states that played key roles in propping up the apartheid government in Pretoria and ensuring the survival of a regime, anachronistic as it was cruel, until the last decade of the twentieth century (though as recently detailed on New Left Project the scale of western collusion with the apartheid regime has been underplayed even by these critics).
One issue that has not been widely noted is the excising from history of Cuba's role in the defeat of apartheid and the external depredations of the apartheid regime as it sought to maintain the internal system of white supremacist rule by destroying nationalist anti-imperialist forces on its borders. The contrasting roles of the United States and Cuba regarding South Africa were part of a broader pattern in which the United States supported counterrevolutionary forces throughout Africa. As part of that counterrevolutionary struggle South Africa was a valued ally of the United States – particularly regarding the newly independent Angola.
In the post WWII period in Africa, as the European colonial systems slowly disintegrated, the United States and the European colonial powers sought to shape that process so as to maintain access to the resources of the former colonies, preventing the newly independent states from making their exit from the new American-led global economic order, and competing with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of the newly independent states.
As South Africa's neighbour Angola approached independence from Portugal in 1975, the Americans threw their support behind UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola), one of three main political and paramilitary forces that had emerged to oppose Portuguese rule. Initially a Maoist grouping, by the 1980s UNITA had become a force of the far right, receiving crucial support not only from the United States but also apartheid South Africa. In response the Soviets and Cubans had backed the leftist MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), recognised by most states as the government of Angola (but not by the United States).
The MPLA became a key ally of the ANC - providing the armed wing of the movement with resources, bases and training. Whilst Soviet support for the MPLA was mostly limited to the provision of arms and technical advisors, the Cubans, following South African intervention, dispatched tens of thousands of troops who fought alongside the MPLA against the South African military – achieving a key victory at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Amongst the objectives of the South Africans at the time was ensuring that UNITA survived in order to prevent the military forces of SWAPO (the South West African People's Organization) threatening South Africa's illegal occupation of Namibia from its bases in Angola.
Whilst depicted as the mere proxies of the Soviets at the time, the present scholarly consensus is that the Cubans' intervention on the continent was undertaken for the Castro regime's own reasons (ranging from access to African resources to sincere ideological opposition to colonialism) and the Cubans frequently clashed with their Soviet allies over their African policy. .. read more:
"One of Our Greatest Coups": The CIA & the Capture of Nelson Mandela - While Obama referenced the Kennedy administration in his memorial, he made no mention of the multiple reports that the CIA, under Kennedy, tipped off the apartheid South African regime in 1962 about Mandela’s whereabouts. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest, a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, quote, "We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups."
