By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on December 11, 2023
Henry Kissinger, – getty images
Henry Kissinger, who will not rest in peace, proposed in 1976 to bomb Havana, subject the city to a naval blockade and mine Cuba’s ports. He fantasized about it seriously, according to documents declassified almost a decade ago and published by Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.
“If we decide to use military power, we must succeed. There must be no intermediate measures,” the then-Secretary of State instructed Gen. George Brown of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a high-level meeting with national security officials on March 24, 1976. “I think we’re going to have to crush Castro,” Kissinger told President Ford.
The pretext? Cuban participation in the internationalist contest in Angola. But the real motive was his sordid diplomacy in Africa and support for the apartheid regime. He was the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit South Africa in three decades, which legitimized and emboldened the apartheid regime after the 1976 Soweto massacre, when dozens of students and residents of that Johannesburg suburb were shot to death by police. (Any resemblance to the U.S. role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza today is no coincidence).
“He had a reputation as a strategic genius,” has said Nancy Mitchell, historian and author of Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War. “But if you study what Kissinger did in Angola and Rhodesia, it sheds light on the weakness of his whole policy in Africa, in the Middle East and in Vietnam. He misread the situation in Angola from the beginning. He never expected the Cubans to help the Angolans.”
Cuba deployed thousands of soldiers to Angola in 1975 to help the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) against attacks by insurgent groups that were covertly supported by the United States and directly by the South African regime. While he fantasized about bombing Cuba, Kissinger was simultaneously promoting furtive meetings in New York to normalize relations with the island and planning his tour of South Africa, which in practice prolonged the life of the racist regime.
It is no coincidence that, in addition to questioning his overestimated intelligence, the diplomat who died a few days ago is identified with the immorality, cynicism and impunity derived from his criminal role in the colonial wars and the support of military dictatorships in Latin America, with a major role in Chile.
Why would Kissinger plan a covert operation in Angola, against the advice of his assistants? The Italian-American historian Piero Gleijeses, who has researched like no one else the conflict between Cuba, the United States, the Soviet Union and South Africa in southern Africa between 1976 and 1991, answers categorically: it was not to counteract the Kremlin. The Soviets were exercising great restraint because they did not want to jeopardize the SALT II negotiations with the United States. Nor did Kissinger argue that U.S. economic interests in Angola were threatened.
“What drove Kissinger was Vietnam,” Piero wrote. By April 1975, South Vietnam had collapsed, and for the secretary of state it was a national as well as a personal humiliation. He calculated that “showing resolve in Angola would exorcise the ghost of Vietnam, and the installation of a client regime in Luanda would provide a cheap boost to American prestige and his own reputation.”
In February 1976, shortly before Kissinger proposed bombing Havana, Cuban troops expelled Pretoria’s army from Angola. A South African military intelligence analyst then wrote to his bosses: “In Angola, the black troops – Cuban and Angolan – have defeated the white troops in military exchanges… and that psychological advantage, that advantage which the white man has enjoyed and exploited for 300 years of colonialism and empire, is fading. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and the whites who have been there know it.”
What happened next is well known: end of apartheid; Angola, Namibia and Nelson Mandela, free. On the other side, Kissinger crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize and as the world’s most dangerous war criminal at large, according to writer Gore Vidal.
Source: Cubaperiodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English