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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Castro's foot soldiers were caught in Africa's wars

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The young Cuban pilot, with the wary look of a hunted animal, sat on a patch of sand in the shade of a thorn bush guarded by a troop of dusty Somali soldiers in the middle of the Ogaden desert.

The Cuban's MiG fighter had been shot down somewhere over the sunbaked wasteland of the Horn of Africa and he was being displayed as a trophy to Western reporters.

It was 1978 and this was just one of the Cold War's proxy conflicts that Fidel Castro, who retired on Tuesday after decades of fomenting revolution around the world, engaged in during the 1960s and 1970s.

Castro, who for some years backed Somali president Siad Barre, had switched allegiance the previous year to Somalia's northern neighbor Ethiopia, where Mengistu Haile Mariam was presiding over a bloody revolutionary purge.

Cuban forces had been sent as military advisors or as fighters to all corners of Africa. Cuba tipped the balance of the civil war in Angola by deploying tens of thousands of troops and beating South African forces.

Others joined conflicts in Algeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco and Mozambique as part of Castro's internationalist mission.

The Ogaden War, a battle over virtually empty land crossed only by nomads in search of pasture for their goats and camels, was perhaps the most farcical of these wars.

To outsiders covering the conflict it had much of the absurdity of the fictional and perhaps mythical war between the "rebels" and the "patriots" portrayed in British novelist Evelyn Waugh's classic spoof of African warfare, "Scoop".

The Soviet Union and the United States essentially swapped sides in 1977, so each found themselves facing weapons they had themselves originally provided to the other side.

The Cuban pilot was in the middle.

As the knot of sunburned Western reporters ate the gristly meat and drank lukewarm camel's milk served in their honor, he ignored a few questions about where and how he was shot down and what his mission has been.

He looked into the distance, across the flat orange ground and occasionally stroked his long chin as some tried to get him to speak of the war.

But one reporter, suspecting he might even be a fake, asked him if he could authenticate himself by naming three Cuban basketball players.

His eyes lit up, and a smile played over his face. He named seven players before he stopped, nodded at the questioner and said: "That's my game!"

Shortly after that the interview was over, and he was walked away by his armed captors into the desert to an uncertain future