Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who died on November 25, supported freedom struggles all over the world.

In East Africa, among the early beneficiaries of this support was a group of Zanzibari youth who studied in Cuba through arrangements made by the Isles’ Marxist revolutionary leader Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu.

Some like Salim Ahmed Salim, a future Tanzanian prime minister and secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity, studied journalism there. Later in the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan administration in the US was to use Mr Salim’s association with Cuba to veto his candidacy for the post of UN Secretary-General.

Other Zanzibari youth undertook military training, which was put into practice during the January 12, 1964 Zanzibar revolution. The Cuba-trained cadres were especially crucial in turning an upheaval by the lumpen proletariat into a revolution, establishing a new national authority and stabilising the country.

The violent leftist revolution and the establishment of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar sent shockwaves through the West, who saw the new Zanzibar as the embryo of “an East African Cuba.”

Various options, including invasion and assassination of Babu and other Marxists, were considered in efforts to reverse the logic of the revolution. So, when the Tanganyika-Zanzibar Union happened in 1964, it was seen as a shock absorber of the isles’ revolutionary fervour.

Notwithstanding US President JF Kennedy’s pleas to Tanganyika’s president Julius Nyerere not to support the armed liberation struggle during their meeting in Washington in 1963, Nyerere not only provided support but Tanzania became the new Mecca for the continent’s armed liberation movements.

Liberation movements such as Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and Agostino Neto’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola opened offices in both Dar es Salaam and Havana. Renowned South African novelist Alex La Guma spent decades representing the ANC in Cuba.

In the Congo, after the 1961 assassination of leftist prime minister Patrice Lumumba, the country was in turmoil. An intense struggle by Lumumbaists and other patriots against Katanga secessionist leader Moise Tshombe and the central government of president Joseph Kasavubu emerged and intensified.

Rebel leaders such a Laurent Kabila, who later became president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, were aided by the legendary Che Guevara, who had left his post of planning minister in Fidel Castro’s government to steer and support revolutionary struggles in Africa and Latin America.

Che spent months in the Congolese bush with the armed groups and visited Dar in 1965 for talks with leaders of liberation movements. Such an “export” of the Cuban revolution and its radical ideas was hated by the US.

Tanzania’s association with the upheavals in the Congo of the 1960s worsened relations with Washington. In 1965, a counsellor at the Tanzanian embassy in the US capital was expelled. Meanwhile, co-operation between Havana and Dar flourished despite the Sino-Soviet split, which had a profound influence on the relations between the leading socialist powers and Tanzania-type polities.

Tanzania’s relations with Moscow were low-key. For various reasons, Tanzania was much more in the Chinese camp. But Havana, despite its strong links with Moscow, opened an embassy in Dar es Salaam and provided support in various sectors, especially health.

Castro played an active internationalist role, especially in the Non-Aligned Movement and its quest for a new international economic order (NIEO). Despite opposition from the West, Havana hosted the 1979 Non-Aligned Summit, which had on its agenda the NIEO, the Arab-Israel conflict and the colonial situation in Africa. President Nyerere used the summit to highlight the obstacles to the resolution of these problems.

As the liberation struggle gathered momentum, more African liberation movements relied on the Soviets and the Chinese, to the chagrin of the US. In a 1969 policy paper, president Richard Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger concluded that the white minority regimes in Southern Africa were there to stay.

But, as the struggle gathered momentum leading to the 1974 leftist Portuguese coup and decolonisation of the Portuguese colonies in 1975, Washington became involved, especially in the self-determination and Independence of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South West Africa (Namibia). But the West’s stance that the plan for Namibia’s Independence be linked to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola slowed down the process.

The Cuban troops had been rushed to Angola in 1976 to stop apartheid South African troops headed to Luanda to overthrow the leftist MPLA government of Augostino Neto that had taken power after the Portuguese left in November 1975.

This was addressed through the scaling down of Cuban troops, the historic fall of the Berlin Wall and a new political dispensation in apartheid South Africa with the replacement of hardliner apartheid leader P.W Botha with F.W de Klerk, who was inclined to ending apartheid and taking Namibia and South Africa towards a democratic transition.

To advance Havana’s ideological thrust, Cuban troops, with Soviet support, became involved in the wars of the Horn of Africa, especially between Ethiopia and Somalia. The latter had been a traditional ally of the Soviet Union since the 1969 Siad Barre coup.

The 1974 overthrow of the feudal regime of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the coming to power of the Marxist-Leninist Mengistu Haille Mariam attracted the attention of Moscow and the Warsaw Pact countries.

In the Ethiopia-Somalia war, the Soviet bloc sided with Addis Ababa and the Cuban troops were sent there to boost the Ethiopian war machine. Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War set in motion the civil war that would end in the overthrow of president Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and the descent of Somalia into a failed state, from which it is yet to emerge.

The US’s dissatisfaction with this outcome and the presence of Cuban troops in the region led to their support of Ethiopia’s anti-government forces, especially Meles Zenawi’s Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Front, which overthrew Mengistu in 1991.

It was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and “socialiste international,” that ended the Cuban military presence in Africa.

Prof Ngila Mwase is a student of international affairs