Now this is what I was looking for (and didn't get) from The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War. George starts with an introductory chapter about Angola's history since it was created artificially as a combination of different ethnic groups smushed into a Portuguese colony, and goes into the pushes for independence and the various outside factors that get involved (the Soviets, the CIA, Cuba, both Congos.)
Then he delves into how Cuba gets involved, motivated by Castro and Che Guevara's ideas of internationalism. While Guevara's attempts to build revolutionary cells in nations throughout Latin America and Africa repeatedly fail (not helped by the fact he published a book about how he would go about it), Cuba did end up getting involved in Angola's civil war when Portugal just up and decided one day they were done running the place.
George shifts between the specific battles inside Angola, spanning the mid-1970s to the late-1980s (at varying levels of scale and outside involvement), and the political maneuvering outside the country. Fidel Castro trying to pursue his ends without pissing off the Soviets too much, the CIA tripping over its own shoelaces badly enough the Clark Amendment gets passed specifically to bar them from getting involved. South Africa (backing Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA in southeast Angola) trying to keep their involvement on the down low, because they're really more concerned about forces that might be trying to infiltrate and disrupt their precious apartheid.
The situation bears a lot of parallels to Vietnam, for Cuba and South Africa both. Neither can seem to get their preferred native faction stable and self-sufficient enough to pull out. Castro doesn't want 30,000+ Cuban soldiers stationed in Angola indefinitely, but their training and Soviet equipment doesn't seem to be enough for the FAPLA forces to actually control the entire country. And while Savimbi's pretty good at a guerilla war, he's not capable of taking control of the country. Which means he can't eliminate the groups South Africa's worried about, so they won't back out. Nobody seems particularly impressed with the fighting skills of the local armies.
George is pretty good about describing the battles - he even includes some maps of troop movements and minefields, which certainly helps - but also at putting them in the larger geopolitical context. The USA exerting pressure on countries whose airstrips Cuba is using as refueling spots to fly troops to Angola. How both sides tend to be more willing to come to the negotiating table when they're winning, which of course makes the other side less inclined to do so until they can strengthen their hand.
Especially in the last chapter or two, George focuses a lot on how things did not stabilize in Angola after Cuba and South Africa pulled out, that the government became exceedingly corrupt. George speaks of how neither Cuba, South Africa, the USSR or the USA really achieved anything lasting in Angola, but I was left thinking that he acts as though the Angolans had little to do with how the resolutions and peace agreements fell apart after they were signed. Maybe that's better left to a book that's more about Angola, and less about a country that inserted itself into the proceedings, then struggled to withdraw.
'One had only to look at the fighting in southern Angola - with SWAPO and MK troops fighting UNITA, whilst SADF troops (in their pursuit of SWAPO) clashed with FAPLA and Cuban units - to see that the two conflicts were entwined. Thus it followed that a regional settlement could only work if both conflicts were resolved simultaneously and - perhaps most difficult of all - interdependently.'
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