Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...familiar bearded figure in army fatigues suddenly popped up in Africa last week. Fidel Castro toured several countries, made anti-"imperialistic" speeches and discussed present and future Cuban military and technical aid. This week he was due to be followed by Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, who will go to Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique in a general effort to increase Soviet influence in southern Africa. Both could take some satisfaction from the fact that an African military force, aided by the Marxist regime in Angola and almost certainly by Cuban troops there, was striking with astonishing success at an essentially...
Last year Cuban military assistance enabled the Marxist guerrilla faction in Angola to win out in a three-way civil war. Last week it appeared likely that a band of soldiers, with the blessing of the Angolans and the Cubans, was on the brink of a sudden new victory in Zaïre (formerly the Congo). Their apparent aim: the republic's copper-mining region, one of the treasures of Africa...
...Shaba region (the former Katanga province) and began to move toward the copper mines. According to U.S. reports, the Katangese had crossed the border in trucks provided by Angola, and were equipped with Soviet-made rockets. They were accompanied by a number of white troops; these could have been Cuban soldiers, but they could also have been Belgian or other European mercenaries who have fought with the Katangese in the past. The Zaïrian army reportedly put up little resistance as the rebels seized one town after another; indeed, Kinshasa was so short of fuel that it had difficulty...
Wide Influence. The attack on Zaïre is the latest-and perhaps most ominous-indication of the fast-growing presence in black Africa of the Cubans, whom former U.N. Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan called "the Gurkhas of the Russian empire." Besides the approximately 13,000 Cuban troops and 4,000 advisers in Angola, Western intelligence sources believe that Havana now has military and/or civilian advisers in the Congo (Brazzaville) (2,000), Sierra Leone (200-300), Guinea (300-500), Equatorial Guinea (300-500), Guinea-Bissau (300), Mozambique (500-600), Tanzania (500), Somalia (650) and, for the past month...
Fidel Castro's trip raised disturbing questions about Cuba's intentions in Africa-and, more important, those of the Soviet Union. To some extent, Castro's trip was undoubtedly an exercise in extending fraternal greetings to African regimes that he regards as sympathetic to Cuban socialism. But Castro's views about "exporting revolution" are too well known to be dismissed lightly. And as the fighting in Zaïre demonstrated last week, a relatively small fighting force, trained in the techniques of modern warfare, has an enormous capacity to destabilize young and fragile nations...