EU’s changing Cuba policy a wake-up call

 

By David Jessop

The President of the European Commission (EC), José Manuel Barroso, has confirmed that Europe is presently in the process of debating a significant change in its policy towards Cuba.

Speaking recently to journalists in Madrid, Mr Barroso, who is a former Portuguese Prime Minister, said that the European Union (EU) is discussing the possibility of modifications to its Cuba policy, and that this will require the blessing of all of Europe’s 28 member countries.

He also reaffirmed the EU’s long-standing wish for there to be change in Cuba in relation to human rights, and its continuing desire to see the adoption of western democratic norms

Although Mr Barroso did not elaborate, his reference was to the likely agreement when Europe’s Foreign Affairs Council meets on 10 February, to the Commission’s proposals that Europe negotiate a form of association agreement with Cuba.

While this will be welcome in Havana and in the Caribbean, taken together with the US’s slowly evolving policy on Cuba, it should be seen as a signal to Caribbean governments and the region’s private sector to begin to plan for the eventual end to the regional economic vacuum that Cuba has been placed in since 1960.

Since late 2012 a draft negotiating mandate has been under consideration and Cuban officials and the European Commission have with the support of EU members states been trying, at times with difficulty, to chart a way forward.

In late 2013 one final stumbling block arose that still has to be resolved. Then, EU permanent representatives postponed consideration of a recommendation from the European Commission to the Council to authorise a mandate that would allow the EC to open negotiations for a political dialogue and a co-operation agreement with Cuba.

The delay reflected concerns raised by some EU member states over a technical legal issue. This relates to whether negotiations, once begun, might under some circumstances be halted.

The delay meant that any decision on formal adoption by the Council of Ministers has had to wait until behind the scenes consensus could be achieved with a small number of concerned member states that are understood to include Germany and on the matters of principle involved.

Once agreement between member states has been reached, however, negotiations are expected to proceed.

The European Commission is expected to propose an arrangement in some respects similar to that signed between Europe and Central American states last year. It is expected to contain language on political, economic and development matters; will provide a framework for dialogue on issues of mutual concern; is expected to enable the provision of development assistance; and may possibly contain arrangements for asymmetric preferential trade.

Although liberalised trade has not been high on Cuba’s agenda, it is believed that this could become a component of a future association agreement as Cuban goods entering the EU have since the start of this year ceased to benefit from Europe’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP), making them less competitive.

Separately, the EC is understood to have reserved sums in its development budget for future assistance for Cuba.

The high level confirmation of a change in Europe policy follows from recent positive statements on the need to improve relations by EU states previously regarded as taking a hard line on dialogue.

It also coincides with an increasing tendency by EU member states to bypass the EU’s common position by signing bilateral agreements and memoranda of understanding with Havana that facilitate broad based exchanges on issues from trade to counter-narcotics interdiction and cultural exchange.

The EC President’s remarks follow comments in Havana in early January by the Dutch Foreign Minister, Frans Timmermans. The visit, the first by a Dutch Foreign Minister since the Cuban revolution, involved two-days of high level exchanges during which he stressed the need for an improvement in the European Union’s relations with Cuba.

He also signed a broad based bilateral agreement that allows for the Netherlands and Cuba to engage in political and other consultations.

As such it was one of a small number of such documents signed recently or being negotiated by EU nations, and marks a further move away from the European Union’s  1996 Common Position on Cuba, which contains political conditions unacceptable to Cuba and that until recently, had all but halted exchanges between Cuba and most EU nations.

Mr Timmermans said that the Netherlands was now particularly interested in strengthening bilateral links noting the economic transformations underway in Cuba and the business opportunities this offered. A delegation of businessmen accompanied him.

He also praised Cuba’s efforts to bring an end to what he described as the last violent conflict in the region, a reference to Havana’s hosting of peace talks between the Colombian government and local rebels.

The visit was particularly striking as the Netherlands is a staunch advocate of human rights and democracy and actively supports dissident organisations in Cuba.

Mr Timmerman’s visit, like President Barroso’s remarks, coincide with changing US thinking on Cuba, although the pace at which US exchanges with Cuba on functional issues will move forward and their breadth is still far from certain.

Some Europeans suggest that Europe’s interest in an association agreement with Cuba is being driven by a desire to have an agreement in place before any improvement take place in US-Cuba relations.

Whether this is true or not, a formal association agreement with Europe would enable not only a much closer relationship with Cuba but also mean that the EU would have reached agreement with the only Latin American and Caribbean country with which it has no form of broad based political and economic arrangement.

Recent developments in Europe and the US in relation to Cuba point once again to the Caribbean needing to consider carefully how it will respond to the possibility that a neighbour and friend may slowly emerge as a competitor after a long period of economic isolation.

David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

This column orginally appeared in www.DominicanToday.com Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org

“The history of Africa will be written as before and after Cuito Cuanavale” – Fidel Castro

Twenty-five years ago, on 27 June 1988, the army of apartheid South Africa was forced to start withdrawing from Angola after 13 years’ intervention in that country’s civil war. The South Africans had been outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the Angolan defence forces (FAPLA – the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), in combination with thousands of Cuban soldiers, and units from both the MK (uMkhonto weSizwe – the armed wing of the ANC) and PLAN (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia – the armed wing of the South West African People’s Organisation). 

The four-month battle between the SADF and the Cuban-Angolan force at Cuito Cuanavale was, to use the words of Nelson Mandela, “the turning point for the liberation of Africa from the scourge of apartheid.”

Background
Cuba’s assistance to post-colonial Angola started in 1975, just a few days after the independence celebrations on 11 November (Angola won its independence from Portugal in the aftermath of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974). At the time, three different Angolan political-military movements were struggling for supremacy: the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola).

The most radical, most popular and best organised of these groups was the MPLA, which had the support of most of the socialist countries. The FNLA was allied with the pro-imperialist Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), and UNITA was collaborating with the US, white-supremacist South Africa and the representatives of the old colonial order.

As Fidel Castro noted at the time: “The Soviet Union and all the countries of Eastern Europe support the MPLA; the revolutionary movements of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau support the MPLA; the majority of the nonaligned nations support the MPLA. In Angola, the MPLA represents the progressive cause of the world.” (Speech given in Havana to the first contingent of military instructors leaving for Angola, 12 September 1975)

South Africa, faced with the prospect of pro-socialist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, independent states in Angola and Mozambique (plus a rising independence movement in its colony of South West Africa – now Namibia), decided to intervene militarily in Angola on the side of UNITA. The SADF entered Angola from Namibia on 14 October 1975, and the MPLA’s army, FAPLA, was in no position to stop its advance. It was, writes Piero Gleijeses, “a poor man’s war. South of Luanda there were only weak FAPLA units, badly armed and poorly trained. They were strong enough to defeat UNITA, but were no match for the South Africans” (‘Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976′).

South Africa’s invasion, along with the continued threat and provocations by Mobutu’s Zaire, caused Fidel Castro and the leading commanders in Cuba to understand that Angola needed urgent help. In mid-November 1975, several hundred Cuban soldiers boarded two planes for Angola. Over the course of the next 13 years, nearly 400,000 Cubans volunteered in Angola, mostly as soldiers but also as doctors, nurses, teachers and advisers.

With Cuban assistance (and with the help of Soviet advisers and weaponry), the Angolans drove the SADF troops back across the border, and for the next decade or so South Africa focused its efforts in Angola around destabilisation, providing significant financial and logistical support for UNITA, thereby extending a brutal civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Angolan civilians.

The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale
As long as Angola was embroiled in bitter civil war, it was not a major threat to apartheid control of South Africa or Namibia. But in mid-1987, FAPLA – with the help of Soviet and Cuban forces – launched a major offensive against UNITA. This offensive had the potential to finally bring an end to the civil war – an outcome that neither South Africa nor the US could accept.

Therefore the SADF intervened again. “By early November”, writes Gleijeses, “the SADF had cornered elite Angolan units in Cuito Cuanavale and was poised to destroy them.”

Ronnie Kasrils notes that the situation “could not have been graver. Cuito could have been overrun then and there by the SADF, changing the strategic situation overnight. The interior of the country would have been opened up to domination by UNITA, with Angola being split in half.

This was something Pretoria and [UNITA leader Jonas] Savimbi had been aiming at for years.”

The Cubans moved decisively in support of their African allies. Fidel decided that more Cuban troops must be sent immediately, boosting the total number in Angola to over 50,000.

Cuito Cuanavale was defended by 6,000 Cuban and Angolan troops, using sophisticated Soviet weaponry that had been rushed to the front.

The SADF had been convinced that its 9,000 elite troops – in addition to several thousand UNITA fighters – would be able to conquer Cuito and thereby inflict a major defeat on MPLA, and indeed the progressive forces of the whole region. But Cuito held out over the course of four months, in what has been described as the biggest battle on African soil since World War II (Greg Mills and David Williams, Seven Battles that Shaped South Africa, 2006).

Kasrils notes: “All the South African attempts to advance were pushed back. Their sophisticated long-range artillery kept bombing day and night. But it didn’t frighten the Angolan-Cuban forces and turned out to be ineffective.”

With the South African stranglehold at Cuito Cuanavale broken by the end of March 1988, the Cuban-Angolan forces launched a major offensive in the south-west of the country. This offensive is what Castro had intended from the start: to tie South Africa down with pitched battles at Cuito (several hundred kilometres from its nearest bases in occupied Namibia) and then launch a ferocious, dynamic attack to drive South Africa out of Angola once and for all, “like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with his right – strikes“.

Castro noted: “While in Cuito Cuanavale the South African troops were bled, to the south-west 40,000 Cuban and 30,000 Angolan troops, supported by some 600 tanks, hundreds of pieces of artillery, a thousand anti-aircraft weapons and the daring MiG-23 units that secured air supremacy advanced towards the Namibian border, ready literally to sweep up the South African forces deployed along that main route.” (Cited in Vladimir Shubin ‘The Hot “Cold War”‘)

Kasrils writes: “The end for the SADF was signaled on June 27 1988. A squadron of MiGs bombed the Ruacana and Calueque installations, cutting the water supply to Ovamboland and its military bases and killing 11 young South African conscripts. A MiG-23 executed a neat victory roll over the Ruacana dam. The war was effectively over.”

The supposedly invincible South African Defence Force had been forced out of Angola. The apartheid regime was left with no choice but to sue for peace.

Turning point for southern Africa
Fidel stated that “the history of Africa will be written as before and after Cuito Cuanavale”. Nelson Mandela is on record as saying that Cuito Cuanavale was “the turning point for the liberation of Africa from the scourge of apartheid”. What made a battle in the Angolan war the major turning point for the wider southern African region?

Isaac Saney explains in his excellent book ‘Cuba: A Revolution in Motion’: “The defeat shattered the confidence of the South African military, and with the approach of Cuban forces toward Namibia, Pretoria sought a means by which to extricate their troops ‘without humiliation and alive’.

Thus, the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was instrumental in paving the path to negotiations. In December 1988, an agreement was reached between Cuba and Angola on one side and South Africa on the other, which provided for the gradual withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and the establishment of an independent Namibia”.

So, as part of the negotiation process resulting from the Cuban-Angolan victory, South Africa was forced to set a timetable for withdrawal from Namibia. Namibia became an independent state in March 1990. The victory in Angola also provided important impetus for the anti-apartheid forces within South Africa. In early 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 long years, the ANC and other liberation organisations were unbanned, and the negotiations towards a free South Africa were begun in earnest. UNITA suffered a series of major military reverses and Angola was able to start pursuing a course of peaceful progress.

These were all extraordinary developments that nobody could have predicted a few years’ earlier.


Not a proxy cold war but an epic battle between the forces of imperialism and the forces of progress
It has been suggested by several western historians that the war in Angola was, at heart, an extension of the so-called Cold War between the two superpowers of the day (the USA and the USSR) with South Africa acting on behalf of the USA and Cuba acting on behalf of the USSR. Such an analysis is wholly refuted by the facts; its only purpose is to place a moral equivalency between imperialism and socialism.

For one thing, Cuba has tended to maintain a high degree of political independence in spite of close relations with the Soviet Union. In Angola, it is well documented that the Soviets were surprised by the sudden arrival – in both 1975 and 1987 – of large numbers of Cuban soldiers. Kasrils writes that the US security services were “surprised to discover that the Soviet Union’s so-called proxy had not even consulted Moscow over Havana’s massive intervention. They were even more taken aback when sophisticated Soviet military equipment was rushed to Angola to supply the Cuban reinforcements.”

Even the arch-reactionary Henry Kissinger, who was among the leading ‘hawks’ in relation to US Angola policy at the time, admitted: “At the time, we thought Castro was operating as a Soviet surrogate. We could not imagine that he would act so provocatively so far from home unless he was pressured by Moscow to repay the Soviet Union for its military and economic support. Evidence now available suggests that the opposite was the case.” (Cited in ‘Conflicting Missions’)

The continuing relevance and necessity of revolutionary internationalism
Why is it important to remember Cuito Cuanavale? Because it represents a pinnacle of revolutionary internationalism, of solidarity between peoples struggling for freedom. As Nelson Mandela said, speaking at a huge rally in Havana in July 1991:

“The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character… We in Africa are used to being victims of countries wanting to carve up our territory or subvert our sovereignty. It is unparalleled in African history to have another people rise to the defence of one of us.”

Cuba’s actions in Angola were driven by a deep sense of social justice and revolutionary duty. One of the historical forces driving its actions was the depth of African roots in Cuban society. Fidel, speaking shortly after the departure of the first few hundred troops to Angola, explained: “African blood flows freely through our veins. Many of our ancestors came as slaves from Africa to this land. As slaves they struggled a great deal.

They fought as members of the Liberating Army of Cuba. We’re brothers and sisters of the people of Africa and we’re ready to fight on their behalf!” This dynamic is reflected in the name that was given to the operation: ‘Carlota’ – in honour of the heroic Afro-Cuban female slave who led an uprising near Matanzas in 1843 and who, upon her capture, was drawn and quartered by Spanish colonial troops.

Raúl Castro pointed out that Cuba had itself benefitted massively from revolutionary international solidarity and thus felt morally compelled to extend the same type of solidarity to others. “We must not forget another deep motivation. Cuba itself had already lived through the beautiful experience of the solidarity of other peoples, especially the people of the Soviet Union, who extended a friendly hand at crucial moments for the survival of the Cuban Revolution.

The solidarity, support, and fraternal collaboration that the consistent practice of internationalism brought us at decisive moments created a sincere feeling, a consciousness of our debt to other peoples who might find themselves in similar circumstances.” Fidel emphasises this point: “As we have said before, being internationalists is paying our debt to humanity.

Those who are incapable of fighting for others will never be capable of fighting for themselves. And the heroism shown by our forces, by our people in other lands, faraway lands, must also serve to let the imperialists know what awaits them if one day they force us to fight on this land here.”

Further Reading

How Far we slaves have come
Read the speeches that Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro gave when Mandela visited Cuba shortly after his release.  Available from the CSC shop priced £8.50 inc p&p

Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s freedom and our own (pictured above)Charts the Cuban involvement in helping Angola achieve independence with contributions from the Miami Five about their experiences there. Available from the CSC shop priced £10 including p&p
 

Available from CSC online shop