Conflicting Missions

This gripping account of Cuban policy in Africa introduces readers to the escalating clash between Cuban agents and the CIA in the Congo and Angola. Gleijeses’s fast-paced narrative takes readers from Cuba’s first steps to assist Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961 to the dramatic dispatch of 30,000 Cuban troops to Angola in 1975—which stopped the South African advance on Luanda and doomed Henry Kissinger’s major covert operation there. Based on unprecedented research, including interviews with virtually all of the countries involved (including closed Cuban archives), this comprehensive, balanced work sheds light on U. S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations.