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I appreciate the spirited responses of Elaine Windrich and James McAllister to my comments on Gleijeses’ “Moscow’s Proxy.” I would like to respond to two of Windrich’s points and offer a brief comment on McAllister’s remarks about the Cuban archives. 1. Contrary to Windrich’s assertion, there is indeed evidence that suggests that Angola "had a habit of treating its patron rather shabbily." Gleijeses cites an important instance: the Angolan government negotiated the Lusaka agreement without consulting the Cubans, despite the fact that they had signed the 1978 bilateral military agreement in which they pledged to confer with the Cubans “before making decisions or taking actions in the military arena.” (p. 123) Moreover, my research shows clearly that during the Carter years the Angolan government had talks with American officials about the possibility of normalizing relations; despite the fact that Cubans were literally dying for the MPLA government, Luanda did not inform Havana of these forays with Washington. 2. In early 1977 the Cubans, Soviets, and Angolans established a major training camp in Boma (Angola) for ZAPU forces. By 1978 it was operating at full capacity – training 6000 ZAPU guerrillas at a time. The Soviets provided the arms, the Angolans the location, and the Cubans the instructors; the Cubans helped the guerrillas return to Zambia after their training was completed. In his memoirs, Nkomo extols the Cuban training. (/Nkomo, the story of my life/, p. 177) The fact that, as Windrich writes, “Rhodesia was a British colony in which the Cubans never set foot” is irrelevant. The key point is that the Rhodesian military was launching increasingly punishing raids into Mozambique and Zambia, and both Kaunda and Machel said that they might be forced to call – however reluctantly – on Cuban forces to protect their countries. US documents show clearly that the Carter administration took very seriously the possibility that this could lead to a “second Angola” in Rhodesia. (See my forthcoming article, “Tropes of the Cold War,” /Cold War History/.) 3. I share McAllister’s desire that the Cubans open their archives, but I also wish – even more fervently – that the US government would open its archives. The fact that the Cuban archives for the late 1970s and 1980s are available to one researcher is, sadly, more than we can say about the US Department of State and CIA archives for the same period – FOIA, the presidential libraries, and the National Security Archive notwithstanding. While the situation is not as dire for researchers in US archives for the pre-1975 period, it is certainly not just in the Cuban archives that historians have to “wonder about the documents” we have not been “permitted to see.” Nancy Mitchell North Carolina State University
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