Cuba’s involvement in and against the Eritrean liberation struggle: a history and historiography

Abstract

The growing availability of previously declassified material on the Cold War has allowed scholars to revisit old questions with new, more decisive, evidence. In this paper, we draw on this archival material to address the unresolved question of what Cuba’s involvement against the Eritrean Liberation struggle consisted of in the late 1970s, and importantly why they engaged in this way, given a historical commitment to the Eritrean Liberation movement’s goals. While a seemingly minor point in a protracted 30-year struggle for Eritrean independence, we argue that clarifying this matters for several reasons, not least that Cuban support for the Ethiopian offensive against the Eritreans was seemingly pivotal for temporarily reversing the fighters’ major gains in the late 1970s, meaning fifteen more years of fighting until Eritrea’s de facto independence was secured. Drawing upon excerpts from the first author’s original book manuscript on this topic, we also suggest that the effects of Havana’s and other government’s denial of Cuba’s involvement in suppressing the Eritrean struggle contributed to the sense of betrayal and distrust that still haunts Eritrean politics and its leadership, as well as those Eritrean liberation fighters who experienced their staunch ally turn into an ideological and material adversary.