The Cassinga attack in 1978 could have been a “total calamity” were it not for the arrival of Cuban forces to prevent more deaths of Namibians at the hands of apartheid South African forces, Cuban Ambassador to Namibia Giraldo Mazola said this week.
The Cassinga attack will be remembered on Monday next week – 37 years after hundreds of Namibians lost their lives after their camp was attacked non-stop for hours. The Cassinga camp, codenamed “Moscow”, housed mainly children and women. It was attacked on the morning of May 4, 1978 by South African forces, leaving over 600 people dead.
“Cassinga was a very unfortunate moment in Namibia’s history because many civilians were brutally murdered by the South African racist forces who later tried to cover up the event through propaganda claiming that the Cassinga camp was Swapo’s headquarters,” narrated Mazola.
The Cuban Ambassador described the attack as a “well-planned” move.
“If there was any country well versed in guerilla warfare it was us because we won a long and bitter guerilla war,” he told New Era in an interview on Tuesday.
“They had a powerful air attack, jammed the radio signals so that Cuban, Angolan and PLAN forces could not communicate and planted landmines on the routes leading to Cassinga to block those who would attempt to assist,” he said.
Cuba at the time had a base at Techamutete less than 40 kilometres from Cassinga. According to Mazola, the SA forces planted bombs on the road linking Techamutete and Cassinga in anticipation of a response from Cuban soldiers to assist at Cassinga when they learned of the attack.
“We lost 16 soldiers and over 78 were injured in the process. The SA forces even had airplanes to distract our soldiers who were rushing to Cassinga. When our soldiers arrived there they found parachute soldiers killing survivors who sustained injuries during the raid – those soldiers fled upon our arrival,” he narrated.
Mazola said the arrival of the Cuban forces was significant because it prevented a total calamity.
Cuba’s relations with African liberation movements began during the 1960s, soon after it [Cuba] attained independence.
Despite the assumption of Cuba acting as a Cold War proxy or that it assisted African states to protect communism, Mazola quashed such claims.
“We respect sovereign nations. As much as we assisted African states during the liberation struggle, we do not impose our ideology on them. Do you see us imposing our ideas on Namibia, Angola or even South Africa?” questioned Mazola.
Students from Namibia studied in Cuba while guerilla war masterminds were sent to Angola to train PLAN fighters. Mazola said Cuba reserved two schools for Namibian students, mostly young Cassinga survivors who at the time possessed limited basic education to upgrade their education and prepare for a future democratic state.
Over 1 000 students attended school in Cuba at two boarding schools named Hendrik Witbooi and Hosea Kutako.
“The only condition we gave to Swapo was that they should send history and geography teachers to teach students Namibian history and the country’s geography. It was crucial that the Cuban-based Namibian students know about their country because after their studies they would come back to their motherland,” said Mazola. “The SA forces even had a photographer who was tasked to take pictures of all dead soldiers who guarded the camp. The photographer was very selective because they omitted the pictures of the dead civilians. They used that to run their propaganda campaign and to strengthen their claims that Cassinga was a military camp,” he said. “The western media did not give enough prominence to the attack at the time because they just focused on the white SA soldiers that were killed instead of focusing on the children and women killed at Cassinga,” he stated.
During the attack, Mazola was the Cuban deputy minister of foreign affairs.
“The date chosen to attack Cassinga was not coincidental because on May 2, 1978 the United Nations Security Council held a meeting to discuss the situation in Angola, and two days later SA decided to attack the camp,” he said.
Despite that, says Mazola, it is nice to see that some of the Cassinga survivors are serving in government as doctors, politicians and engineers to contribute to the development of the country.
Following the attack, Mazola said Cuba prepared a school in Angola’s Benguela province for Namibian students to learn English so that they could be sent to Cuba.
“When the Spanish colonized us, they took over millions of slaves from Africa to work in Cuba. Those slaves contributed to building Cuba as well as our economic development. Therefore after we attained independence in 1959, we immediately built relations with our African brothers and sisters,” he said.
Cuba has over the years assisted many developing African states in the medical and engineering fields. There are over 36 000 Cuban doctors outside Cuba and an estimated 100 000 in Cuba.
An estimated 500 000 Cuban soldiers were deployed on intervals to Angola between 1975 and 1990.