Re: US/UN/East Timor/Portugal

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>"Rabble", "psychopaths" and "racists", must refer to Holden Roberto's men
(who were, of course, black), the FNLA, not the south-africans.

>>That's one of the reasons I give some credibility to the theory of a deal
with
Moscow. Lisboa for us, Luanda for you and business as usual.<<

Rabble was Holden Roberto's force, racists were the south Africans and
psychopaths some of the mercenaries the CIA signed on for the effort. Those
were Stockwell's descriptions.

The attitude of the USSR is an interesting question. In CNN's Cold War
series, Fidel Castro says the first contingents of Cubans, a few hundred
"advisors" were sent to Angola without even notifying the Soviets. (Fidel
does not add this, but I've seen elsewhere that the decision was partly for
security reasons: Cuba was afraid the planes might be attacked if word got
out). This tends to be confirmed by contemporary accounts, especially the
one written by Gabriel García Márquez. The follow-on force, which came by
boat and took longer to get there, and was explicitly combat units, not just
advisors and brought the total Cuban force to several thousand, is what got
the Soviets involved. According to Soviet officials interviewed in the Cold
War series, it was that larger force that drew them into the Southern Africa
situation, as they could not refuse to supply the Cuban contingent, and thus
willy-nilly allowed themselves to get dragged into a conflict where as they
view it no vital soviet interests were at stake. (Obviously, from the point
of view of these Soviet functionaries, it was a mistake.)

In terms of Portugal, there is no question but that the USSR was for it
becoming one more capitalist "democratic" western European country. The quid
pro quo wasn't Angola, the Soviets had little interest in Angola, the movers
in that situation were the Angolans and, of course, the Cubans. The Soviet
quid-pro-quo offer to the US and NATO was simply you leave the Warsaw Pact
countries (and Cuba) alone, and we leave you alone.

The Cuban interest was in developing as series of third-world revolutions,
which was not something the Soviets shared, but with Nikita Khruschev having
made Cuba a "full member," so to speak, of the Socialist Bloc, and having
staked the USSR's credibility with the Americans on Cuba surviving, the
Soviets were more or less stuck with tolerating, and even helping, to some
degree, the Cubans as they pursued their policy.

I'm fairly sure that IF the Cubans had asked the USSR to begin with about
Angola, the Soviet response might have been, sure, help them if you want,
but not in such a way as to commit or compromise the credibility of a
member of the socialist bloc (which implicitly commits the USSR, too, as
the ultimate guarantor of all the actions of all the members of the bloc).
And the soviets might even have gotten the Bulgarians to throw in a few
shipments of canned vegetables, to show what good guys they were, but they
would not have assumed responsibility for defending Angola against the US
plot to subvert and dismember it, which is what the Cubans did.

José




---

Free computers.  Free Internet access.  I don't pay -- why should you?
Click on www.free-pc.com to get started today!