With Piero Gleijeses, Linda Heywood, Christabelle Peters, Adriano Mixinge, Tony Pinelli and Ned Sublette

In November of 1975 the Cuban government made a major military intervention in Angola’s independence process. Forty years later we gather to commemorate this historical moment and its consequences with #CubAngola40 - a daylong symposium at New York University. The conference gathers participants, witnesses, critics and scholars to remember and reconsider the event, to illuminate its political and cultural consequences and rethink the relevance of this important chapter of Global South history.

What happened in November of 1975?

Forty years ago, the Cuban government launched Operation Carlota, a large-scale military intervention in Angola while this African country was on the eve of its independence from Portugal. The Cuban military victory over the forces supported by the United States and South Africa represented an explosive chapter of the Cold War and of the African decolonization. The consequences were immediate and long-lasting, since the resulting defeat of South African troops contributed to the end of the white-supremacist regime of Apartheid. In that context, the intervention of a small Latin American country into the two main geopolitical struggles of the time was not only unique, it represented an audacious South-to-South cooperation.

Nonetheless, this important historical fact still underrepresented. A great deal of historical and cultural material remains open to exploration, discussion, and scholarship. Hence, #CubAngola40 begins to redress the scant attention this event has received and will strive to answer many pertinent and suspended questions:

What did the internationalism behind this event mean,or what could it have meant to today’s racial politics of the African diaspora and to transnational solidarity?

What political role did the Bantu-based cultures shared by both countries since early slave trade bring to bear in the Angola-Cuba context?

In light of recent changes in US-Cuba relations, can we expect new narratives, revelations, or perspectives regarding the intervention?

Check here for more information and program schedule. Also follow this link to RSVP.

Organized by NYU CLACS.

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PARTICIPANTS

Piero Gleijeses is a professor of United States foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University. His 2002 book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959–1976, won SHAFR’s Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize for 2003. He is also author of Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (2013).

Linda Heywood is a professor of African History and the History of the African Diaspora and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola: 1840s to the Present and co-author with John Thornton of Central African, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of America (2007) which was the winner of the 2008 Melville Herskovits Award for the Best Book published in African Studies.

Adriano Mixinge is an Angolan writer and historian with studies in Art History at the University of Havana, Cuba. He serves as a cultural advisor with the Embassies of Angola in Spain and France, and has worked as a professor at the National Institute of Artistic Training and Culture (INFAC) of Angola. Mr. Mixinge is author of O Ocaso dos Pirilampos (2014), a novel about power relations that evokes contemporary Angolan politics.

Christabelle Peters is a cultural theorist specializing in the relationship between race and national identity, with a particular focus on transnational links between Angola, Brazil and Cuba, author of Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience (2012). Prof. Peters is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies at The University of Warwick, UK.

Tony Pinelli is a Cuban musician, producer and radio host. He became known in Cuba in the early 1970s after joining the vocal quartet “Los Cañas”. In 1975, Mr. Pinelli traveled to Angola as a member of the artistic brigades, playing for the Cuban and Angolan soldiers and population with other important musicians as Silvio Rodríguez and Grupo Manguaré. Mr. Pinelli has recently moved to Miami, where he presents “De Lo Que Habla Pinelli” for América Tevé.

Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press, 2004), co-founded the 1990s record label Qbadisc, which specialized in contemporary Cuban music. He traveled to Angola in 2012, researching and recording for four one-hour documentaries for Public Radio International’s Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep, including “The Cuban Intervention in Angola,” featuring the commentary of Piero Gleijeses and Tony Pinelli.