by Marie Arana
ISLAND FEVER
Cuba, 1870–1970
The people get the governments they deserve.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1811
Cubans, too, eventually felt the need to shuck their overlords, and when their dissatisfaction became fury in 1868, they fought for liberation for the next thirty years, losing half a million people—rebels and Spaniards—in the process. Once independence was won, and Spain was thrust from Cuba’s shores, the island was quickly swept by another master: Mammon, a seemingly bottomless gluttony for riches. Prompted by postrevolutionary desperation and quickened by American ambition, seeds were laid for a half century of exploitation and corruption. Just as Mexico’s dark-skinned races continued to be at the mercy of descendants of Spaniards, Cuba’s brown remained hobbled by white, sacrificed to a full-fledged, booming capitalist economy. And just as silver had enslaved the hemisphere, a craving for sugar now shackled Cubans to Fulgencio Batista and his American minders. It was an inescapable reality throughout Latin America: the Spanish system had never been truly scuttled; its overlords had simply been replaced by home-grown tyrants and greedy foreigners. The downtrodden became filled with disillusionment; the wars of independence had been a rude trick. A sham.
When, in 1958, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary compadres rode that wave of discontent from the jungles of Mexico to the streets of Havana to purge Cuba of its capitalist masters, the sword fell once more on the Cuban people. By 1961, two thousand of them had been executed at the hands of Castro’s revolutionary forces. By 1970, five thousand had been shot or hanged and dumped in mass graves. Twenty thousand more were rotting in dungeons as political prisoners. Half a million had fled the country and headed for asylum in Miami. If wars among the indigenous tribes in pre-Columbian Cuba had taken a grim toll five hundred years before, so had every “ism” that followed: colonialism, capitalism, communism. All had resorted to bloodshed: from outright butchery, to gangland revenge, to racial and political oppression, violence had remained the easy expedient.
The potential for unrest intensified in 1970 when Castro pledged to produce the Zafra de los Diez Millones, a whopping ten-million-ton harvest of sugar, breaking all records and doubling the production of the year before. In that single-minded pursuit, meant to prove that the new Cuba was a nimble, vibrant economy, Castro sent the entire population to the sugar fields to cut cane. By then, Fidel was the self-proclaimed dictator of Cuba: its prime minister of the Revolutionary Government, first secretary of the Communist Party, commander in chief of the Armed Forces, and president of agrarian reform. He governed as the old Spanish colonial Marquis of Havana once said one could easily govern Cuba: con un violín, una baraja y un gallo fino—with a fiddle, a deck of cards, and a fighting cock. His Zafra was not an idle goal; it became a dictum. Cubans who had been gainfully employed as doctors, professors, dockworkers, soldiers, farmers were abruptly directed to drop their professions and take up work as cane cutters. Castro’s ten-million-ton campaign had come to stand, in his own words, for “far more than tons of sugar, far more than an economic victory. It is a test, a moral commitment. And precisely because it is a test and a moral commitment, we cannot fall short by even a single gram.”
Every able-bodied man and woman was ordered to contribute to the challenge. Whole tracts of land were cleared for planting, trees felled, croplands abandoned, wildlife displaced. Ships sat in docks—unloaded—for months at a time, schools were shuttered, hospitals and prisons emptied. As one journalist described it:
from every far corner of Cuba, men and women were summoned to battle for sugar production as if the country were at war. Beneath the soaring chimneys of giant American-built mills—now named after revolutionary heroes—laborers fed threshers around the clock, colossal turbines ground on incessantly, day and night. In the inky predawn, you could make out the shadows of enormous trucks as they lumbered through mud, delivering students, office workers, prisoners, soldiers. Hundreds of thousands filed silently along the roads, armed with machetes, tramping down paths redolent with a pungent sweetness. Their faces would soon show evidence of the corte—the harvest—as every whack of their machetes was answered by rigid stalks, whipping back like angry swords.
The face of Cuba soon exhibited more scars: foreign trade was virtually paralyzed—a punishing hardship in an island country. Factories that produced raw materials were shut down, precious commodities were abandoned. Cuba’s two-hundred-thousand-man army, by far the most aggressive military force in Latin America at the time, was called to slog in the cane fields, leaving a highly militarized, carefully managed country to the hazards of chance. Hundreds of hectares of banana trees went unharvested, left to rot and die. Animals perished without fodder. Cuba went hungry, transportation sputtered to a standstill, education halted. Castro’s fixation had become an echo from the past: the Zafra was not unlike the conquistadors’ rash, stubborn, ultimately catastrophic instinct to herd whole populations to the mines to satisfy Spain’s lust for gold and silver. The effects had been backbreaking then, and they were backbreaking now. Famine swept over Cuba. Disease, corruption, and violence were not far behind. In the end, after all the sacrifices and the devastation, the Zafra fell considerably short of its mark. The goal of ten million was never met. And, in the process, the country was virtually gutted.
Castro was not deterred. Soon he was seeking increased assistance from the Soviet Union and looking for other ways to distinguish Cuba in the eyes of a larger world. Communist insurgencies had been bubbling up in a number of Third World countries: bands of guerrilla fighters, many of them Cuba inspired and Cuba supported, had been knocking about Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay since the 1960s; in the 1970s they were joined by Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, and Argentina. But it was Africa that caught Castro’s attention. A war on a far continent presented a distinct public relations opportunity for an ambitious country that had little currency to give but plenty of human muscle. This was the Cuba in which Carlos Buergos found himself when, out of work, barely emerging from adolescence, and on the verge of a free-wheeling profligacy, he was pressed into service to fight for the Communist cause in Angola. It was 1975, Carlos had just turned twenty, and despite his distinct lack of accomplishments, he was a young man in the prime of life: fit, robust, fearless, with just the right degree of impetuosity that might be useful in a guerrilla warrior. He shipped out to Angola, much as his thrill-seeking ancestors had shipped out from Spain hundreds of years before—hungry, expectant, cheeky, and thoroughly ignorant of the world he was stepping into.
TWISTED
Angola, 1975–1976
The chief says burn everything. By everything he means everything. Women, children, everything.
—General Ben Ben, Angola
Cuba’s history with Angola had been slight, but its political sympathies were strong. A decade earlier, the African nation had sought independence in an all-out war against its colonial masters. This was a struggle Cuba could understand. For three centuries before that bid for freedom, Portugal had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the West African slave trade, marauding the coast, capturing well over a million souls, and shipping them in shackles—and for considerable profit—to the New World. When human trafficking was finally banned in 1836, Lisbon was obliged to change its strategy. Now it urged its colonial avatars to continue to round up slaves, but instead of driving them onto ships, they forced them to toil on Angolan plantations. Within a century, Portugal was not only reaping the profits of a vigorous agricultural economy in Angola, it was also profiting from an unexpected bonus: a lively diamond trade. But the fate of this colony, like that of the Spanish colonies 150 years before, changed overnight when the país mãe’s—the mother country’s—government came to an abrupt end. An unexpected coup in 1974 brought political havoc to Portugal, overthrowing a Fascist dictatorship that had ruled it for four decades and marking the end of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Angola, which had long fought a scrappy war against its col
onizer, was suddenly fighting a bloody war against itself. Three separate factions began a ferocious battle for control of the newly independent nation: the leftist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), supported wholeheartedly by the Soviet Union and Cuba; and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), along with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), both of which were backed by apartheid South Africa, Israel, and the fervent anti-Communist realpolitik of the United States.
It was a rabid contest for the soul of a fledgling republic, until then one of the most developed, economically vibrant of African nations. Just as the Spanish Civil War had been prelude to the Second World War, the civil war in Angola now became a proving ground between two hostile superpowers—a grisly, brutal conflagration by proxy between Africans armed to the teeth by the Soviet Union and those fitted out by the United States. Cuba elected to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Communists, contributing whatever troops necessary to bring victory to the revolutionaries. It was a stubborn, perversely homicidal, seemingly never-ending bloodbath, and as a result, Cuba would pour half a million men into the country, hold out for seventeen years, and suffer thousands of casualties.
For Carlos, the call to serve had come without warning or explanation. The Cuban army began rounding up the unemployed, delinquents, punk rowdies like him—any able-bodied young men who might feed the maw of an ungovernable, distant war. At the time, Carlos was out of work, romancing a married woman, slumming with fellow ruffians in the Parque de la Libertad in sleepy Matanzas when, abruptly one balmy Friday morning, he was called to report to the military command. Suddenly there was a fist at the door, a brusque shout, and he was told to appear that afternoon, or the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces would come looking for him. It was December 1975. He had turned twenty a few months before.
The vast majority of youths who huddled that day in the dank, fusty army headquarters on General Betancourt Avenue were even younger. The presiding officer was pock-faced, gravel voiced, gruff. “You boys from Matanzas?” he growled, one eyebrow arched. Then he surprised them with a chilling snort, a sharp peal of laughter. “You’re from Matanzas. And you’re headed to matanzas. There will be plenty of matanzas where you’re going. With your big, black, shiny AK-47s. Believe me, you’ll get your fill of ’em.” Massacres. The town of Matanzas (“killings”) had been named for the slaughter of Spaniards on the shores of those crystal-blue waters nearly five hundred years before. The Cuban indigenous had not taken kindly to invaders. Carlos laughed nervously at the burly man’s wordplay. He had no idea that the officer was deadly serious; that, as a recruit, he was poised to relive his boyhood trauma again and again, a hundred times over—the cane cutter with the blood halo, the machete suspended overhead—except that it would be seven thousand miles away and in more harrowing circumstances.
It was precisely in the last weeks of 1975 that the Soviet Union engaged in a massive airlift of Cuban soldiers and tens of thousands of Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles to the jungles of Angola. The Soviets would supply the hardware. The Cubans would supply the cannon fodder. Carlos would be surrounded by neophytes like himself—untrained farm boys and city wastrels, sent into a war they hardly understood. Thousands were gathered for la previa—boot camp—in military installations near San Antonio de los Baños, where they were taught to wield Soviet weapons and operate Soviet radios. One month later, Carlos and his cohort were informed they were going on a secret mission. Issued phony passports that ascribed phony occupations, they were loaded onto buses and taken in caravan to meet—to Carlos’s bafflement and delight—Fidel and Raúl Castro. In the course of that indoctrination, they were told that their mission was to defend their black Communist brethren against imperialist white South Africans. They were hectored to fight fat-cat plutocrats, those shameless, blood-sucking American vampires who were raping Africa and supporting the corrupt government in Johannesburg. They were told to think of this war as akin to the great Communist revolution in which their forebears had risked and sacrificed their lives. Their contribution to the cause was, El Comandante assured them, an expression of “proletariat internationalism.” More than that, the new recruits did not know. All the same, within a few weeks, there would be thirty thousand more of them. A decade later, it would be more than seventy thousand. Over the course of the war, almost 350,000. It was remarkable—if not unique in history—for a Third World country to undertake a military operation of that magnitude.
Carlos soon learned that the war they had joined was a brutal conflagration in which children as young as eleven were mustered to jungle skirmishes. Hard-bitten soldiers with human trophies flapping from their belts—ears, noses, fingers—were his comrades in arms. He found himself armed with an AK-47 bayonet, crawling on his belly through thick brush in night raids on villages. It was impossible, at times, to know who the enemy was. The white South African forces fighting the Communist insurgents used black Angolans to carry out the sorties. In the heat of battle, it was difficult to tell whether a man or boy creeping through the green with a knife in his teeth was friend or foe.
One moonless night, Carlos was deployed with a posse of young Angolans to penetrate a stubborn knot of American-funded and -equipped FNLA guerrillas who were holding out just beyond a mine-ridden field, south of his base of operations in Luanda. As they made their way toward the camp, they were spotted by a lone woman, walking through the high grass, carrying a jug on her head. The men dropped to the ground, and she began sprinting toward the enemy camp, putting their ambush in peril. One of the Angolans drew out a poison-tipped blowdart and swiftly shot it into the woman’s spine, felling her like an animal. Shaken, Carlos staggered ahead, clutching his AK-47 to his chest, swatting the insects that flitted about drinking his sweat, trying to block out what he had just seen. Suddenly, with no warning, and with a blood-curdling cry that seemed to rise from the belly of the earth, a wall of humanity sprang from the brush and rushed at them with machetes, shouting. Orange bursts exploded at his side, raising black smoke that stung his eyes and clouded the darkness. He could hear his comrades fall with loud thuds and cries, either by knife, or machete—he could not tell which. The gunshot seemed to be coming from his side. For a fleeting second, as he stumbled through the fumy night, he saw a man sprawled in the grass, his head cleaved open, pink spilling from his crown. Carlos moved on, startled, rubbing his eyes. In the chaos, he could not make out much more. The fighting seemed disembodied, deafening, and strangely elsewhere. Shooting and running, he made it to a cluster of trees and then, deeper still, into a forest, as the sounds of battle died off into an eerie silence.
He climbed into the branches of a tree, hoping to catch some sign of his squad, but there was none. Nothing to see save the flickering stars above. Nothing to hear but the loud chirp of crickets, the rustle of beetles, the croaking of frogs. He spent the rest of the night in that aerie, alert to the dark world around him. Come morning, saved by the natural compass of sunrise, he clambered down to head southwest, where he knew his camp to be. He hadn’t been walking long when he was suddenly confronted by a mangy, yellow-eyed dog. It stiffened as he approached, bared its teeth, growled. He didn’t dare shoot or provoke a bark, lest he would betray his position. He dropped to his haunches and scooted toward it slowly, quietly, leveling his bayonet at the blight-bitten fur. The dog snarled, spit a grayish froth, shifted this way and that, but eventually Carlos was able to get close enough to lunge at the cur with his blade. The steel slid through the thorax as if it were penetrating soft clay, exiting the other side. The dog hardly had time to issue a final whimper. It dropped in a heap where it stood.
Staggering ahead for hours, exhausted, Carlos finally spotted a fellow Cuban in a familiar green beret, guarding the perimeter of their camp. When he rejoined his unit, he learned that every last member of his squad, apart from him, had been hacked to death by machetes.
* * *
There would be long stretches with nothing to do but play ball
in the dirt with Angolan children, a boom box nearby blaring Cuban rhumbas. There would be days spent trekking through the wild, scouting the landscape, dodging herculean spiders and spitting cobras. Enemy skirmishes would surprise, and violence would be met by cruder violence, upping the ante until Carlos understood that his best weapon was his raw animal instinct. Kill or be killed. Mistakes would be made with that calculus. And he made them. Fellow combatants would die at friendly hands. But, hewing to it, he always managed to live another day.
If Carlos had been a thief, a liar, and a petty swindler in Cuba, he had become a hardened killer in Angola. A soldier in Angola once asked, “What have they done to us? . . . sitting here in this landlocked place, imprisoned by rows of barbed wire in a land that doesn’t belong to us, dying of malaria and bullets, fighting an invisible enemy, fighting the dark nights as thick and opaque as a mourning veil?” What they had done was forge yet another generation of Cubans well acquainted with the power of violence. Carlos vowed that if he ever made it out of Angola alive, he would try to reform, be more like his father. Hardworking, Responsible. He would put killing behind him. Maybe settle down, find a job, have a family. But in Castro’s Cuba, he had never really had a job. He had never had an expertise. He had one now.
In time, his battalion was sent deeper into the interior to battle South African forces that were pressing toward Luanda. By then, Cubans were using flamethrowers to incinerate villages, low-flying planes to drop napalm on cattle ranches. Carlos was running through a field just south of Huambo one early morning in 1976, answering an order to charge, when he heard a sharp crack, and the world went black. A well-aimed bullet had ripped into his skull, grazed the edge of his brain, and exited the rear of his cranium. He would never know how much time passed between that headlong race across open meadow and his waking up in a medical bivouac somewhere in the African bush. When he finally regained consciousness, he felt a taut, heavy bandage gripping his head, a fetid cot beneath. His bones ached. His vision was blurred. It took awhile before he could make out the blue uniforms of the medics standing before him. They laughed as they recounted the trouble they’d had digging the lead slug from his head. “Made in USA,” they told Carlos. It had left a hole in his skull and a deep, angry scar in his forehead.
