The SADF in the Border War

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Leopold Scholtz. The SADF in the Border War

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Leopold Scholtz

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Piero Gleijeses, the only academic ever to have been granted access to the Cuban archives, maintains that South Africa’s decision to invade Angola had nothing to do with any Cuban presence in the country, as Pretoria afterwards alleged. In fact, he says, things were the other way round: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s initiative to intervene in force was in reaction to the South African invasion.[78] Strictly speaking, he is quite correct but the argument loses its relevance when all the facts are taken into account.

Castro’s decision to start moving his main force of several thousand men was taken only on 5 November 1975, about two weeks after the South Africans crossed the border on 23 October. But Gleijeses is quite silent about the fact that, by 1974, the Cuba and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union) had already decided to aid their friends in the MPLA to attain sole power in Angola. The huge quantities of military equipment channelled to the MPLA from late 1974, a flow that accelerated in March 1975, and the hundreds of Soviet and Cuban instructors and military advisors who were sent to Angola, tell their own story.[79] Soviet aid to the MPLA was duly noted in an SADF report, dated 26 April 1975, to PW Botha. It was recommended that South Africa should try to bring the FNLA and UNITA together in an anti-communist alliance.[80] Military involvement was not on the agenda at this stage.

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