Hello @gavvet
Without Soviet and Cuban weaponry, and without Cuba's 50,000 troops, the MPLA would almost certainly not have beaten UNITA and the South African Defence Force at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in 1988.
The defeat fatally undermined the apartheid regime, and Nelson Mandela would declare: "We are deeply indebted to the Cuban people for the selfless contribution they made to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in our region … we will never forget those who stood by us in the darkest years of our struggle against apartheid."
It is easy to romanticise the "historic friendships" that the USSR, Cuba and Yugoslavia offered African liberation movements and governments, as Calvert 22's "Red Africa" season seems to, especially with so much information about the era still locked in archives.
The truth is nuanced. The USSR and Cuba's involvement in countries like Angola and Ethiopia has dark episodes too, and has been heavily criticised. Many members of the Non-Aligned Movement (which brought together governments and liberation movements from across the Global South) saw both Soviet and Cuban intervention as another form of colonialism, a sentiment echoed in some accounts from Angola at the time.
There are also political reasons that parts of this history have been airbrushed from mainstream retellings of the Cold War - not just in the West but also in Russia, which sought to downplay Cuba's role compared to that of the USSR, and even Angola, where " former adversaries of the MPLA - mainly the USA and China - have become the most important trading partners," as Christabelle Peters points out.
"Where lies the incentive to bring up an uncomfortable or inconvenient historical fact?"
The recently initiated rapprochement of the US and Cuba could change that - but on this, historian Edward George suggests a Russian expression.
"The trouble is, you never know what's going to happen yesterday."