The Gods Must Be Crazy II reminded me that Cuba had sent troops to get involved in some conflicts in Africa. I didn't know anything beyond that, so I did what I usually do: asked my dad for a book on the subject for Christmas. He said the pickings were slim, minus a book that was running $100 (I assume on ebay, I get the impression he's sworn off using Amazon), and if this was the best remaining option, I can believe it.
This book is not so much about the civil war in Angola, which spanned decades, as about one specific battlefield, the town of Cuito Cuanavale, located in the southeastern portion of the country. I had to look that location up online, because there's not a single map in this thing. The battle was one that stretched over a period of months from 1987 into 1988, and was perhaps closer to a siege. Defending the city, the Angolan government's forces (FAPLA), utilizing Soviet weapons, and initially with Soviet advisors and later Cuban soldiers assisting. Beseiging, the forces of UNITA, which was primarily from Ovimbundu tribes in southern Angola, assisted by South Africa's military, but also with financial aid from the U.S.
That last bit Polack attributes to the U.S. learning from Vietnam that it was more cost-efficient to arm some guerillas and let them fight, than get involved directly. I'm not sure that's true, given how it seems to keep rolling back around to bite the U.S. in the Middle East, but I can definitely see someone making a series of spreadsheets arguing in favor of it.
Let's get this out of the way first: This book needed serious editing. Not just the large number of punctuation errors or spelling mistakes, of which there are some on almost every page. Just the way things are arranged in terms of the presentation of the information. Polack will spend a couple of paragraphs in a chapter on casualties pondering the question of why South Africa, with an army of over 40,000 permanent soldiers, and far more part-timers than that, would send only 5,000 troops to Angola, and almost uniformly the youngest and least-trained soldiers. Then, he'll spend a paragraph on how many "private security firms" (read: mercs) South Africa has in Iraq in the 2000s, presumably as some sort of point about what a large fighting force they had available but did not use, before switching to friendly fire casualties in the battle at Cuito Cuanavale in the next paragraph.
Polack frequently presents information in an order that is puzzling or just plain confusing. He has a chapter about UNITA, mostly its organizational structure, but he discusses it all the way forward into 2002. Keep in mind, this is before he's discussed the battle in any sort of depth, let alone how what happened at Cuito Cuanavale is in any way relevant to what happened to UNITA in the 2000s. He'll devote a brief chapter to a UNITA general, or a South African commander, but again, he hasn't really shown how those people are important to this battle. It feels more like there was enough available information on their backstories and careers to provide some detail, so he went with it.
The book is at its strongest when he actually sticks to the battle itself. He discusses the challenges both sides faced, such as how much the dense vegetation limited visibility, both on the ground and in the air. Or how the South African forces seemed most concerned with limiting casualties, which caused them to be extremely cautious, while the Soviet advisors did the FAPLA forces no good by pushing military strategies unsuited for the terrain, not to mention the highest ranks tendency to flee by helicopter at the first sign of trouble. Even here, he tends to split things up oddly, putting the aerial aspects in their own chapter, even though he was already mentioning the fear the South African forces had of the Cuban MIGs as something that tended to blunt their progress.
It wasn't really what I was looking for, as it's far too narrowly focused. But even as far as the actual subject matter of the book, the organization of what information there is works against it.
'The FAPLA movement to Mavinga was a classic Soviet twin pincer movement, a battle plan that hadn't worked in the mountains of Afghanistan and didn't work in the bush of Angola.'
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