ABSTRACT
For thousands of Cuban troops, teachers and doctors streaming into Angola during the 1975 civil war it was something like a homecoming. A certain romanticism marked Castro's reminder that race and culture were among the links uniting Cuba with Angola. Westerners could hardly object to Cuban efforts, between 1960 and 1975, to raise living standards in needy African and other countries. The most dramatic element in Cuban - and later Soviet - involvement in Africa during the 1970s lay in its scale, depth and essential success. Cubans argued that their presence in Angola, ironically, had yielded a positive spin-off exploited by the Americans and British in dealings with white Rhodesians and South Africans. Cuba and Yugoslavia were the only two communist states which had been charter members of the non-aligned movement when it was founded in 1961.
