Reversing the Middle Passage: Cubans’ Voyage Back to Africa in the Revolutionary 1970s and 1980s

This paper explores a kind of twentieth-century reversal of the Middle Passage, the Atlantic voyages that were definitional to the Atlantic world into the nineteenth century: the trip that thousands of Cuban men and women made to Angola and other African countries in the 1970s and 1980s to fight for those nations’ independence. Fidel Castro justified Cuba’s participation in African liberation wars as compensation for Cuba’s complicity in the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Africans during the slave trade, going so far as to name the first expedition of Cuban soldiers “Operation Carlota” after the female leader of an 1844 slave uprising in Cuba. This paper explores the metaphorical and historical connections between the two kinds of voyages, centuries apart and in opposite directions. In the nineteenth century, captive Africans established Cuba as one of Spain’s most valuable American colonies. In the late twentieth century, Cuba’s alliance with postcolonial movements across Africa solidified its position as a leader of the Third World, providing it with allies in the face of unrelenting U.S. hostility. In both cases, the labor that benefited Cuba was performed (mostly) by people of African descent. While other scholars have charted the diplomatic exchanges and confrontations that defined Cuba’s African wars, this paper will follow the soldiers who travelled to Africa—carefully avoiding the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico on their way out of the Caribbean—and fought alongside Angolan liberation fighters, asking how they understood their own contributions to a new world order as they charted a very old path across the Atlantic.