Cubans, Cubans Everywhere

The familiar bearded figure in army fatigues suddenly popped up in Africa last week. Fidel Castro toured several countries, made anti-"imperialistic" speeches and discussed present and future Cuban military and technical aid. This week he was due to be followed by Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, who will go to Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique in a general effort to increase Soviet influence in southern Africa. Both could take some satisfaction from the fact that an African military force, aided by the Marxist regime in Angola and almost certainly by Cuban troops there, was striking with astonishing success at an essentially pro-Western country in black Africa, Zaire--and the U.S. could not do much about it.

Last year Cuban military assistance enabled the Marxist guerrilla faction in Angola to win out in a three-way civil war. Last week it appeared likely that a band of soldiers, with the blessing of the Angolans and the Cubans, was on the brink of a sudden new victory in Zaire (formerly the Congo). Their apparent aim: the republic's copper-mining region, one of the treasures of Africa.

The radio in Kinshasa, Zaire's capital, called the invaders an army of "mercenaries led by other mercenaries from across the Atlantic and prompted by a third country with an ideology of international conquest"--clearly a charge that the Cubans were involved actively and the Russians indirectly. In fact the soldiers were Zairian rebels who had fought in the army of Katangese Leader Moise Tshombe in the early 1960s. Remember Tshombe? He tried to set up his own regime in the copper-wealthy province of Katanga and secede from the Congo. After the central government crushed that movement (with U.N. and U.S. help) in 1963, many Katangese soldiers fled across the border to Angola. Eventually they joined forces with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.), largely because their old enemy, Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, was supporting a rival Angolan guerrilla group, Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.). Now, apparently, Agostinho Neto's M.P.L.A. government is helping the Katangese to even an old score with Mobutu.

Imperial Manner. The invasion started quietly a fortnight ago when the Zairian rebels--probably no more than 2,000, though Kinshasa placed their number at 5,000--slipped across the border into Zaire's Shaba region (the former Katanga province) and began to move toward the copper mines. According to U.S. reports, the Katangese had crossed the border in trucks provided by Angola, and were equipped with Soviet-made rockets. They were accompanied by a number of white troops; these could have been Cuban soldiers, but they could also have been Belgian or other European mercenaries who have fought with the Katangese in the past. The Zairian army reportedly put up little resistance as the rebels seized one town after another; indeed, Kinshasa was so short of fuel that it had difficulty flying reinforcements into the fighting area. By late last week, some reports said that the invaders were within 90 miles of the crucial mining center of Kolwezi.

The essential fact of national life in Zaire is that the central government must have the revenues from the copper mines to survive--and once again, the government's control of those mines is in jeopardy. Over the past 16 years, the U.S. has always helped Zaire in moments of crisis. Despite his imperial manner and lavish personal taste, President Mobutu has so far managed the considerable feat of holding his mineral-rich country together. Almost helpless to influence the sudden state of affairs in Zaire, the U.S. dispatched two planeloads of military supplies to Kinshasa; Belgium, the former colonial power, sent a shipment of light arms and got ready to dispatch a lot more. France and West Germany also dispatched aid to Kinshasa.

Wide Influence. The attack on Zaire is the latest--and perhaps most ominous--indication of the fast-growing presence in black Africa of the Cubans, whom former U.N. Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan called "the Gurkhas of the Russian empire." Besides the approximately 13,000 Cuban troops and 4,000 advisers in Angola, Western intelligence sources believe that Havana now has military and/or civilian advisers in the Congo (Brazzaville) (2,000), Sierra Leone (200-300), Guinea (300-500), Equatorial Guinea (300-500), Guinea-Bissau (300), Mozambique (500-600), Tanzania (500), Somalia (650) and, for the past month or so, Uganda (about 100). In Mozambique the Cubans help with sugar growing and perhaps with the training of Rhodesian guerrillas. In Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, they advise the army as well as the Somali guerrillas who are active in the neighboring French territory of Afars and Issas (otherwise known as Djibouti), which is set to become independent this summer. And now, judging by Fidel Castro's current swing around Africa, they seem to be extending their influence to Ethiopia as well.

By the time he reached Addis Ababa last week, Castro had already stopped in Algeria, Libya, South Yemen and Somalia, a desert land where Soviet influence is particularly strong. From there, he proceeded to Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbor and archenemy. His presence in Addis Ababa must have pleased the current military boss, Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, since Castro is the first head of state to visit Ethiopia since the country's squabbling junta (known as the Dergue) dumped the late Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. Mengistu was believed to have asked Castro for military aid, but there were no indications of how Castro responded. Even more intriguing were rumors that Fidel was attempting to mediate the longstanding territorial quarrel that divides the Marxist regimes in Somalia and Ethiopia. Observers speculated that he might have delayed his departure from Ethiopia because he did not want to cut short his effort at shuttle diplomacy.

Fidel Castro's trip raised disturbing questions about Cuba's intentions in Africa--and, more important, those of the Soviet Union. To some extent, Castro's trip was undoubtedly an exercise in extending fraternal greetings to African regimes that he regards as sympathetic to Cuban socialism. But Castro's views about "exporting revolution" are too well known to be dismissed lightly. And as the fighting in Zaire demonstrated last week, a relatively small fighting force, trained in the techniques of modern warfare, has an enormous capacity to destabilize young and fragile nations.

Another destabilizing burst of violence came last week in Brazzaville, capital of Zaire's stridently Marxist neighbor, the People's Republic of the Congo. There an unidentified group of men burst into National Popular Army staff headquarters and gunned down President Marien Ngouabi. A pudgy French-trained army major who survived several previous attempts on his life, Ngouabi, 38, was long a bitter enemy of Zaire's Mobutu. His tiny (pop. 1.3 million), dirt-poor country has enjoyed Soviet patronage for years, and its airport served in 1975 as a convenient refueling point for Cuban troop planes bound to aid Angola's M.P.L.A. guerrillas. Ngouabi's killing--which Radio Brazzaville laid to "imperialist commandos"--was apparently the work of one Captain Kikadidi, who managed to escape while most of his assassination squad was cut down. An eleven-man military junta assumed power in the Congo, imposed a curfew, closed borders and banned all public meetings.

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