Piero Gleijeses has presented yet another scholarly gift to those interested in the history of southern Africa, and in particular Cuba’s role in keeping South Africa from exerting its will in the region during the Cold War. More than that, Gleijeses provides carefully collected evidence of how the Cold War powers were forced to engage militarily and diplomatically with the Cubans over Angola. In ways that will redefine Cold War diplomacy in Africa, Gleijeses’s latest book has set the record straight in terms of American complicity with South Africa in its unsuccessful attempts to remove Cuban troops from Angola, to assist in South Africa’s support for Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA to destabilize Angola, and to intervene in Angola to keep SWAPO from gaining power in Namibia.

The scope of Gleijeses’s research on this topic is truly unparalleled. As Gleijeses explains, he visited Cuba regularly to conduct interviews with those involved in the defense of Angola. He also made expert use of Cuban, Russian, and South African archives to develop a conversation with the records he found in the Carter and Reagan presidential library archives. And he interviewed numerous American diplomats involved in the Carter and Reagan years in southern Africa, making this the most thorough treatment of the topic to date. Geographically, the book spans the major centers of the Cold War as well as the regional and local powers, but Gleijeses guides the reader on a journey beyond the usual formal moments of contact between Cold War powers and regional actors to delve into the intricacies of internal debates in Havana, Washington, and Pretoria (with occasional trips to Moscow and Luanda). It is no accident, then, that the subtitle for this volume is similar to that of Gleijeses’s previous excellent work: Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959‒1976 (UNC Press, 2002). By including the capital cities in the subtitle, Gleijeses is signaling to the reader that his subject is not particularly the wars and diplomacy in Luanda or how Angolans interacted with the Cold War powers. Rather, this is a narrative about, and a historical judgment of, Cold War power relations and how they were determined by the Cuban state’s historical agency. The villains remain the U.S. and its Western allies, first and foremost South Africa, although the latter was not subservient to U.S. power; Gleijeses gives many examples of South African leaders’ mistrust and resistance to U.S. pressures. Similarly, the Cubans, including both Fidel and Raul Castro, are shown to have been the leaders on Angolan policy and not subservient to Soviet interests and advice. Both were completely involved in Cuba’s major contribution to the defense of an African nation against South African and Western forces.

While Gleijeses is convincing in proving the resolve and commitment of the Cubans to defend Angola at a cost disproportional to Cuban resources and strategic interests, he has little room here for a moral assessment of how damaging this Cold War conflict was for Angola and the region. Ever the realist, Gleijeses is not concerned with moralizing over the human costs of the Cold War in Africa. He remains disciplined in his focus on setting the historical record straight: Cuba was the victor, South Africa and the U.S. were the losers. Perhaps diplomatic history as a genre leaves little room for moralizing, but perhaps the moments of hagiography in regard to Cuban leaders and generals are in themselves a type of moral judgment.

For example, there are points in the book where a commitment to proving the righteousness of Cuba’s role leads Gleijeses to judge Cuba’s actions positively in comparison to those of its enemies. In explaining Castro’s commitment to Ethiopian leaders and to Mengistu’s Derg government in 1977, he defends the decision by saying that at this stage it wasn’t clear how bad things would get, and in any event, the CIA was also reporting progress in Ethiopia. In the conclusion, he portrays Cuba’s ability to act independently of Soviet control while remaining reliant on Soviet aid in a positive light, compared to U.S.‒Israel relations during the Cold War and Israel’s “freedom of maneuver” (514). Both of these examples do show Cuba’s importance, but they do not necessarily suggest any more commitment to “freedom” than the CIA or the state of Israel displayed.

In addition, the title, Visions of Freedom, may be read as having to do with the freedom of less powerful states to maneuver in the Cold War, in particular, the capacity of Cuba and South Africa to force the Soviet Union and the U.S. to accept their decisions on Angola. Perhaps these “visions of freedom” show us some of the similarities between Cuba and South Africa—that is, how smaller states were able to take advantage of the Cold War to effectively fashion their own nationalist notions of freedom and how they benefited from Cold War military spending by the superpowers. However, this is not apparently the vision that Gleijeses has in mind. His narrative exudes a deep faith in a military and diplomatic strategy that successfully fought against Western imperialism and a racist apartheid South Africa. There is no room for moral relativism here, or a discussion of the successes or failures of the Angolan state. Nevertheless, it is clear that the liberation movements in power at that time, and which still control Angola and Namibia, owe a great debt to the Cubans for their military support. As Gleijeses informs us, thirty-six thousand Cuban soldiers were sent to Angola between November 1975 and April 1976, followed by a reduction, and then a major increase in the late 1980s, with a peak at fifty-five thousand in August 1988. Gleijeses notes that two thousand Cubans died defending Angola, making the death toll, on a relative population scale, comparable to that of the Americans in Vietnam.

There is much here for historians of American foreign relations with Africa, particularly in regard to Gleijeses’s ability to relate internal tensions in the Carter and Reagan administrations to Cuban and South African interventions in Angola. The Brezezinski‒Vance competition in Carter’s administration is a main theme in the first half of the book, with Brezezinski constantly making it difficult for Vance to approach a détente with the Cubans. Similarly, Chester Crocker, Ronald Reagan’s powerful Undersecretary of State for Africa, receives extensive coverage in the account of the Reagan years, and while Gleijeses is adamantly critical of Crocker’s constructive engagement with South Africa, and the linkage of Cuban troop withdrawals from Angola with a meaningful negotiated majority rule in Namibia, he defends Crocker on other issues. In particular, he respects Crocker’s efforts, and those of the State Department’s Africa Bureau and Secretary of State George Schultz, to keep the conservative Republicans and evangelicals from pushing the Reagan administration to support RENAMO in Mozambique, or to go further in supporting UNITA. Yet in the final analysis both the Carter and Reagan administrations, according to Gleijeses, were to blame for the Angolan wars because of the covert aid to Savimbi’s UNITA and at first real and then tacit support for South Africa’s aims in Angola. One of the goals of both of Gleijeses’s books is to disprove the lie of two administrations that the U.S. became involved in Angola only because the Cubans “invaded and occupied Angola as Soviet proxies, while the United States sought to bring peace and democracy to that unhappy country.” He argues that “in America’s memory, Reagan’s policies of constructive engagement and linkage persuaded South Africa to see reason and agree to the independence of Namibia”—a viewpoint, however, that “distorts reality” (513). Much of the narrative shows how the Cubans in particular were the ones who forced the South Africans to finally withdraw from Angola in 1988, to “abandon Savimbi,” and to “agree to free elections in Namibia” (508). Gleijeses goes to great lengths to prove that it was the Cubans, with Soviet military aid (U.S.$6 billion) but not Soviet control, who masterminded both the diplomatic and military efforts to allow Angola and SWAPO to succeed. Chester Crocker would later take credit for this, but Gleijeses is not convinced that the U.S. policies had much impact on South African behavior; it was the final military defeat of the SADF by Cuban-led forces in 1987 that made the difference.

This is an important book, not only for setting the diplomatic record straight over a central theater of Cold War conflict, but also because Gleijeses is a master at breathing life into texts of internal debates and struggles to explain why the official diplomatic record rarely, on its own, constitutes the “truth.” There is always much to learn from Gleijeses about writing diplomatic history. Never satisfied with deriving meaning from memorandums of conversations between world leaders, he takes the time to provide future generations with the backstory, showing the politics, the lies, and the often empty promises that appear in the official record.