The World

Jovial, peppery, diminutive, foul-mouthed, the Little Cannon was now the Paramount Leader. Deng soon gave up most of his positions, deciding everything during meetings at home with veterans – known as the Eight Immortals after eight heroes of Chinese mythology – smoking, playing chess and expectorating into a spittoon, while his youngest daughter Deng Rong took notes. In world affairs, he advised, ‘Observe calmly, secure our position.’ The west was charmed by Deng^*

but, impatient for a thaw, Chinese students hoped for pluralism. Little Cannon was flexible about ideology and economics but never about power: that still came from the barrel of a gun.

In November 1975, the last empire, Portugal, suddenly withdrew from Africa, as a new foreign power arrived: the Cubans.

CASTRO’S AFRICA

Castro’s anti-colonial war was an almost symmetrical inversion of history, the irony of which he appreciated: as the son of a Spanish colonialist, he dispatched his overwhelmingly black army to fight US-backed forces all over Africa. Cuba, he said, was ‘repaying Africa for the slave trade’. He regarded Africa as ‘the weakest link in the imperialist chain’ and was willing to impose Marxism – a European ideological antidote to European empire – on the continent. His intervention was jump-started by a coup in Lisbon: in April 1974, a cabal of captains, weary of domestic oppression and African wars, seized power. Their Carnation Revolution, establishing democracy in Portugal, ended five centuries of empire and thirteen years of colonial wars – but accelerated a bloody scramble for Angola.

On 11 November 1975, Agostinho Neto, Marxist leader of the MPLA liberation movement, a Lisbon-trained doctor and son of a Methodist pastor, declared Angolan independence and seized the capital Luanda just as two rival anti-Communist factions occupied other parts of the country. Neto, married to a Portuguese, was a veteran revolutionary who had met Castro and Che in Havana and been regularly imprisoned by Salazar, while continuing to practise medicine. After the colonial wars under Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship and centuries of Portuguese predation, the war was brutal. Neto executed any opposition, declaring a one-party Soviet-style state, and appealed to Moscow and Havana for help. ‘We accepted the challenge,’ said Castro, who pointedly called it Operation Carlota after an enslaved female who, ‘in 1843, led one of many risings against the stigmas of slavery and gave her life’. The Americans backed the other factions, and their covert ally, South Africa, occupied South West Africa and then invaded Angola. Thirty-six thousand Cubans were rushed to prevent the fall of Luanda, soon boosted to 55,000. ‘Few times in history,’ boasted Castro, who flew in to visit the front, ‘has a war – the most terrible heart-rending human action imaginable – been accompanied by such a degree of humanity on the part of the victors.’ Cuban troops, he added, were there for fifteen years. As late as spring 1988, some 40,000 Cuban, Communist Angolan and Namibian troops defeated Angolan rebels and their South African allies at Cuito Cuanavale, the largest modern battle in African history. Over 300,000 Cuban troops served in the country.

Angola became the ferocious front line in a proxy war raging across southern Africa from ocean to ocean. In the west, Castro backed insurgents in South West Africa; in the east, in Portugal’s other colony, Mozambique, Samora Machel, a well-off farmer’s son whose grandfather had fought for the last Gaza king, declared independence, backed by Castro and fighting counter-revolutionaries backed by South Africa. After centuries of Portuguese rule, and forty years of ferocious right-wing dictatorship, Machel nationalized property, tortured opponents in ‘re-education centres’ and executed 30,000 class enemies. In the centre, the 270,000 white Rhodesians defied British plans to grant independence to six million Africans. Backed by apartheid South Africa, the Rhodesians fought against the overwhelmingly black majority,^* who were claiming independence decades after most of Africa for the country they called Zimbabwe in honour of the ruined thirteenth-century city.