AFRICA: Countering the Communists

• Share

No doubt about it: Jimmy Carter was mad as hell. At a press conference in Chicago last week, the President castigated the Soviet Union for its continued "interference in the internal affairs of African nations." He accused Cuba of being a "surrogate for the Soviet Union," adding: "It is a joke to call Cuba nonaligned." And he warned the Russians that "unless they show some constraints on their own involvement in Africa and on sending Cuban troops to be involved in Africa, [they] will make it much more difficult to conclude a SALT agreement."

Scarcely a year ago, Carter was rejecting his critics' "inordinate fear of Communism" and ridiculing those who thought it imperative to react "every time [Leonid] Brezhnev sneezes." What eventually brought the President to the point of taking a different line was the latest crisis in Africa, this one in the huge copper-rich nation of Zaïre, once known as the Belgian Congo. There, a force of 1,900 French and Belgian paratroops, assisted by 18 U.S. jet transports, had just routed another invasion of Zaire's Shaba region (formerly Katanga province) by secessionists based in Angola.

Cuban Premier Fidel Castro insisted to the ranking American diplomat in Havana, Lyle Lane, that no Cubans had participated in the Shaba raid. In fact, said Castro, Cuban advisers had learned of the raid beforehand and tried to talk the Katangese out of going through with it. Washington officials could not prove Castro wrong and were not quite sure how to interpret his words. In any case, there was no doubt that over the years, the Cubans and the Angolans had armed and trained the Katangese and were therefore implicated in the mischiefmaking.

Of itself, the attack on Zaïre was deadly serious. The downfall of President Mobutu Sese Seko—the avowed goal of the secessionists—could have led to another full-scale civil war in that perennially troubled country. But it also raised questions as to how the U.S. and its allies should cope with what appears increasingly to be a strong Soviet-Cuban political campaign in black Africa. Three years ago, the Cubans helped the Marxist faction of President Agostinho Neto win a civil war in Angola against two other nationalist groups. The Cubans stayed on to shore up Neto's Popular Movement government and to carry on the fighting against the pesky UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi in the southern part of the country. Last year the Cubans moved into Ethiopia in a big way. Reinforced by huge supplies of Soviet equipment, they helped the unstable Marxist junta in Addis Ababa drive Somali insurgents out of Ethiopia's Ogaden desert region. Now the Ethiopians, with the reluctant help of their 17,000 Cuban guests, are attacking secessionists in the northern province of Eritrea, where a brushfire war has been smoldering for some 15 years. All told, Cuba now has 43,000 troops on duty in at least 14 African nations.