Angola’s Debt to Cuba is Unfinished

Battle of Cuito Cuanavale Memorial in Angola

By Vijay Prashad

In ‘Freedom Park’ (S’kumbuto) outside Pretoria (South Africa), there is a Wall of Names that honors the men and women who died in the fight to liberate South Africa from apartheid. Amongst these are the names of two thousand and seventy Cuban soldiers who died in Angola between 1975 and 1988 for the liberation of southern Africa. It is said, however, that two thousand two hundred and eighty-nine Cubans died in that period in the region. In August 1975, the first group of Cuban military advisors arrived to assist the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) against the Angolan forces (mainly UNITA) backed by the South African apartheid state. Their numbers swelled to 375,000 Cuban soldiers and pilots as well as civilians (including doctors and teachers). It was these Cubans, alongside the MPLA troops, that defeated the South African apartheid forces and their UNITA allies at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. When he was released from prison, the first place outside South Africa that took Nelson Mandela was Cuba. In Havana, in 1991, Mandela said, “Without the defeat of Cuito Cunavale, our organizations would not have been legalized. Cuito Cunavale marks the divide in the struggle for the liberation of southern Africa.”

The Cuban mission in Angola was named Operation Carlota, in homage of the enslaved woman who led a rebellion in Matanzas against slavery during the Year of the Lash (1843-44). When Africa needed help, Cuba answered the call.

Today, Cuba needs solidarity. It has been under an illegal blockade for nearly seventy years and now for several months has been under a genocidal oil blockade. The United States has prevented all energy lifelines from entering Cuba, blocking ships from Venezuela and Mexico and threatening to sanction freight and insurance companies that assist Cuba. Blackouts plague the island nation of ten million people, whose ability to live their bare life has been called into question. This is an emergency. There is no other way to describe it.

Angola is one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil and—at its Luanda Refinery—it produces refined oil products. The oil in Angola is owned by the state company, Sonangol, which has contracts with a range of Western oil firms from TotalEnergies (France), Eni (Italy) and Chevron (United States)—all countries that defended its enemies during the war. Angola’s offshore reserves have made it a key player in global energy markets. Oil revenues have transformed Luanda into a city of obvious contrasts: gleaming skyscrapers alongside informal settlements, with the wealth of the oil unevenly distributed, and the development of the country hamstrung by structural inequalities. The MPLA has governed the country since 1975, although this is not the MPLA that fought alongside the Cubans till 1988. José Eduardo dos Santos, who led the country from 1979 to 2017, abandoned Marxism and shaped the oil industry and privatized lucrative state assets to benefit a small rentier elite (including his family).

Despite the limitations of the situation in Angola, in 2015, the government of Angola erected a large bronze statue at Cuito Cunavale that depicts an Angolan (MPLA) soldier and a Cuban soldier standing across from each other and together holding up a map of Angola. It is a powerful symbol of the reality of how Angola won its sovereignty—with Angolan and Cuban sacrifice and struggle. Without Cuba’s intervention, it is entirely plausible that Angola would have fallen under the control of forces aligned with apartheid South Africa and Western interests, its resources extracted under conditions far less favorable to its people. The oil that Angola now sells on the global market might never have been under Angolan control at all. In this context, the question of Angola providing oil to Cuba is not merely economic, but historical and moral.

Both the MPLA and Angola’s government have condemned the illegal US blockade against Cuba. In September 2025, Angola’s President João Lourenço said that the “unjust and prolonged” blockade which causes serious harm to the Cuban people must be “unconditionally lifted.” Since then, the US has only tightened its grip on the Cuban economy.

A Russian oil tanker, the Anatoly Kolodkin, arrived in Matanzas (Cuba) on 30 March to break the siege. That tanker is named after a famous Soviet jurist who was one of the men who drafted the UN treaty on the Laws of the Seas (1982) and who sat on the International Court of Justice. Perhaps the Russians wanted to send a message about international law when they selected that tanker to carry oil to Cuba against the illegal US blockade. Perhaps President Lourenço can provisionally rename one of the Angolan oil tankers Carlotain honor of the Cuban operation that helped in his country’s liberation. Sonangol would face legal challenges, but so be it: Cuba surmounted any number of threats and challenges to assist Angola, and then left without asking for anything.

History does not move along neat moral lines. It is jagged, contradictory, and often indifferent to the sacrifices made in its name. Yet there are moments when the ledger of history becomes clear enough that we can speak, without hesitation, of obligation—of debts incurred not through coercion, but through solidarity. The relationship between Cuba and Angola is one such moment. It is a relationship forged not in trade agreements or diplomatic formalities, but in blood, in sacrifice, and in a shared commitment to the liberation of Africa from colonial and apartheid domination.

We live in a time when the language of solidarity has been hollowed out, replaced by the technocratic vocabulary of ‘partnerships’ and ‘investments.’ Yet the history of Cuba and Angola reminds us that another kind of relationship is possible—one based not on extraction or profit, but on mutual commitment to human dignity. Cuba did not send its sons and daughters to Angola because it expected oil in return. It did so because it believed that the freedom of Angola was inseparable from its own revolutionary ideals. That belief, whatever one thinks of it, had real consequences. It changed the course of history in southern Africa. Today, Angola can respond—not out of obligation imposed from outside, but out of a recognition of shared history. To provide oil to Cuba would be to say that the sacrifices of the past are not forgotten, that internationalism is not a relic, and that the Global South can still act in ways that defy the narrow logic of profit.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books(New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.