Breaking the Silence: Cubans’ memories of the Civil War in Angola
May 14 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
The Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries presents the first of two spring webinars examining the largely untold stories of Cuba’s military intervention in Angola.
Late 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of Cuba’s entry into the Angolan conflict, one of the Cold War’s most significant proxy wars. From 1975 to 1991, more than 300,000 Cuban troops — backed by the Soviet Union — supported the MPLA government against rival factions funded by the United States and the invading army of apartheid-era South Africa. Thousands of Cuban educators, doctors and other professionals also served. Yet the personal toll of that experience, including trauma, dislocation and hardship, has long been overshadowed by official narratives of socialist internationalism.
This webinar brings together two voices working to recover those buried histories. Anthropologist Katrin Hansing, who is completing a book drawn from long-term ethnographic research and interviews with Cuban veterans, will be in conversation with Lisbon-based Cuban author Karla Suárez, whose fiction has explored Angola’s lasting impact on Cuban society. A Q&A will follow. The conversation will be conducted in English and Spanish.