Cuba's Angola Failure

 In 1974 Agostinho Neto proclaimed to the world that he intended to transform Angola into an African Cuba. He did more than that; he improved on the original and not only because 30,000 Cuban civilians and soldiers, along with Soviet personnel, constitute the support of the reigning Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). There are other similarities.

An exported revolution founders on famine and inefficiency

Domingo de! Pino is the correspondent in Morocco for the liberal `El País” 

of Madrid from which this is excerpted

Published by Work Press Review/November 1980

About 1964 Ché Guevara, then Cuba’s Minister of Industry, jokingly told his followers, “If American imperialism didn’t exist we would have to invent it in order to have someone to blame for our failures.” Similarly, the Angolans have made South Africa and its extraterritorial aggression the scapegoat for their own deficiency. The MPLA cites the South African menace as justification for the presence of Cuban troops and Soviet advisers. The fact is that the Cubans began to arrive long before the first South African soldier entered Angola.

The MPLA’s victory over South African invaders in 1976 which some people attribute to Henry Kissinger’s intervention and others to the heroism of Angolan troops- was largely the result of secret negotiations between the South African Government and the MPLA. In these extraordinary talks South Africa was assured that its holdings in southern Angola, chiefly the Caleque hydroelectric complex on the Cunene River, would not be affected a promise that theMPLA has honoured.

The amount of aid South Africa gives to the MPLA’s opposition the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) is vastly exaggerated in order to discredit this domestic enemy. UNITA does receive some assistance from Pretoria but it is also supported by the majority in Angola’s largest provinces.

At an MPLA Congress in December among many items on the agenda is selection of a new President. Since the death of Agostinho Neto the caretaker President has been José dos Santos, but real power is reportedly in the hands of MPLA Secretary General Lucio Lara, who enjoys the support and confidence of the U.S.S.R. Dos Santos is black, however, and Lara is nearly white which is as much a disadvantage as being black in South Africa.

The country is at a critical juncture. South African hostility continues. Furthermore, there is talk of a political testament by Agostinho Neto in which the late President reportedly did a complete about face on the issue of Soviet and Cuban influence in Angola.

Angola undoubtedly will be influenced by the success of the economic pragmatism of Mozambique’s President, Samora Machel, and by the new situation created by the independence of Zimbabwe, which probably will become a strong ally of Mozambique.

The international circumstances that allowed the MPLA to seize the monopoly of power in Angola (the Portuguese revolution and its manipulation by the Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal) and that inhibited the U.S. and the West from reacting to the arrival of Cuban troops in Angola have completely changed. Nevertheless the MPLA is unlikely to change radically, just as the U.S.S.R. is unlikely to relinquish its hold on Angola. There is also little likelihood that theMPLA will decide on its own initiative to lessen its pervasive political control.

The MPLA has so impoverished its people that many of them wonder if the long years of struggle were worth it. The Angolan revolution was largely the work of poets. When they are hungry such men can dream up a better world, but when they finally acquire power they can turn the world into a living hell .

In a country where commodities are scarce, only books abound but only Soviet books, not the best of the Soviets’ modern works, but discussions of economic policy or of the international labour movement. Angolan bookstores carry only dismal works from the 1950s, including an endless selection of the works of Leonid Brezhnev.

Administrative irresponsibility, defeatism, absenteeism, and an undeclared workers’ slowdown have made the Angolan regime an aberration that only the Soviets and the Cubans would dare call an “example of African Socialism”. Luanda, the capital, has collapsed. Public transportation no longer functions. Buses, improperly maintained, are abandoned in empty lots after only two years of use. Any administrative action is an adventure in paperwork that can take months.

The scarcity of food and the anarchy of distribution create long lines outside stores. Buyers must often wait more than twenty four hours, and since there is a curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. they must hide in doorways when it begins and then fight to regain their place in line the following morning.

The capital is tired, dirty, forgotten. The MPLA has an aversion to big cities and does not know how to organize them. But 70 per cent of Angola’s industry is in the Luanda region. Factories now operate at only 20 30 per cent of capacity. Under a regime with so much coercion, the only way workers can protest the system is by lowering their productivity.

Wonder if years of struggle were worth it…

The petroleum industry, which is in the hands of Gulf Oil of the U.S. (offshore at Cabinda) and Petrobras of Brazil (south of Luanda), is the only sector of the Angolan economy that has surpassed its production levels of 1973, the last year of Portuguese administration. Angola is now producing 170,000 barrels of oil a day, compared with 150,000 before the revolution.

All other economic sectors are in a steep decline. In 1973 Angola produced 240,000 tons of one of the world’s best coffees. This year, it expects to harvest only 40,000 tons. Having once produced more than 100,000 tons of corn, sugar, and potatoes, Angola must now import 100,000 tons of corn to stop the spread of famine in several southern provinces.

This doesn’t mean that the Government has no money. Far from it. While the internal economy is a shambles, Angola’s oil and diamond exports (one third those of 1973) have produced one of the healthiest trade balances in Africa. This foreign exchange, and less publicized income such as South African payments for electrical energy, help offset the waste of a Government that sends 1,000 officials on foreign visits every two months, plus the cost of technical assistance from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany.

The pro Western guerrillas of UNITA continue to harass Government forces in various regions. In response the regime’s Cuban advisers have devised a strategy under which inhabitants in areas of UNITA strength are moved to Government controlled zones. The exodus has created grave food problems.

Bié Province is the hardest hit. A million and a half people have been herded in the last twelve months into jungle camps around Cuimo, the provincial capital. Local authorities are incapable of feeding this enormous mass of refugees, and hunger is taking its toll. Joao Baptista, provincial commissioner of Bié and a member of the MPLA’s Central Committee, reports that “people are dying like flies.”

We visited a village near Cuimo that illustrates the problem. The twelve families that live there had been joined by almost 4,000 refugees brought in by the Army. A party official told us that two people die every day from hunger and another two from disease.

The irresponsibility and insensitivity of the Administration in Luanda only makes things worse, according to the commissioner. He says, “When I tell them there’s nothing to eat in my province, when I beg them to send corn, the bureaucrats pull out the 1970 census and say, “Bié has this many inhabitants, so we’ll send that many trucks of corn.” There is no way to convince them that by mid 1979 I had half a million refugees, by the end of the year I had a million, and now there are a million and a half. And the population is growing at a rate of 30,000 a month.”

During a tour of two neighbouring provinces we visited several places that appeared to have crop surpluses. We asked Baptista why he kept waiting for Luanda’s inadequate aid instead of sending his trucks to these areas to obtain corn, particularly when it was a matter of life and death. “I don’t have the money,” he replied. “Besides, we have a planned economy, and I can only take what the plan assigns me. Surpluses are distributed by the Ministry of Internal Trade.”

The State not only lets its refugees starve to death; it also exploits the few productive peasants in ways that not even the Portuguese colonialists did.

The effect in the countryside

So is the familiar subsistence agriculture. In the past each family took its surplus crops to a Portuguese shopkeeper who exchanged them for oil, salt, vegetable oil, and the other things peasants needed or could afford.Today the Portuguese shopkeeper’s role is filled byENCODIPA, a Government agency that reports to the Ministry of Internal Trade. But while the Portuguese colonist bought and sold according to the law of the marketplace, ENCODIPA, managed as it is by the bureaucracy in Luanda, not only is unaware of the peasants’ needs but it passes along to them the enormous cost of its administrative inefficiency and bureaucratic apparatus.

Worse still, ENCODIPA bewilders the poor peasants who want to exchange their corn, potatoes, or onions for other articles. Corn, which is considered a staple, is bought by one department of ENCODIPA; onions and potatoes by another. As a result, when the farmers want to exchange their products they have to stand in three or four different lines in as many locations.

For the past four years UNITA guerrillas have represented the principal threat to the stability of the Socialist regime installed by the MPLA. What worries the MPLA most is not the military strength of the insurgents, but the moral authority that UNITA commands in certain regions and the effect of tribal differences on relations between the inhabitants of those regions and the central Government.

Lt. Col. Santana André Pitra – alias Petroff – is a former MPLA guerrilla and a former chief of police of Luanda. For the past year he has been Commissioner of Huambo, one of Angola’s most unstable provinces, whose capital was in UNITA’s hands until February of last year. Today, Petroff claims, UNITA is no more than a “band of isolated groups” whose chief occupation is finding enough food to survive. This flatly contradicts Government propaganda, which has UNITA receiving generous aid from South Africa.

Petroff says the motivating force behind UNITA is the belief that “they are ‘‘fighting Soviet anti Cuban neo-colonialism. They want to create a nation of blacks because the MPLA consists of Northerners, whites and mulattoes. It’s no longer true that the MPLA consists solely of Northerners, but it is true that the Party is controlled by Soviets and Cubans and that the Government is made up of whites and mulattoes.

The main problem the MPLA faces, he says, is the scarcity of food and medicine- “We can’t tell the refugees we represent a Marxist Leninist revolution,” he says, “because they don’t care. What they want is food, clothing, and schools.”

Is the MPLA aware that refugees are starving and that their situation is critical? “We have made military gains;” says Petroff; but he concedes, “We can’t feed the refugees. “We have money, but there is no place to buy food.”