The Portuguese traded with the inhabitants of Angola and worked to convert them to Christianity from the late 15th century on. Over the next few centuries Portugal became increasingly involved in the African slave trade, which disrupted the local political and economic systems in Angola. Portuguese settlers soon dominated the coast and organized the local economy around supplying slaves to Brazil, Portugal's South American colony.

Portugal's claims to rule the lands and people of Angola were officially recognized by other European governments in 1891. Portugal expanded its control beyond the coast which led to a dramatic growth in export products. These were primarily cash crops grown by Portuguese settlers, though some Angolan groups competed successfully. Portuguese control created great hardship for both Africans and Afro-Portuguese people. As a result, nationalist movements emerged in the capital of Luanda and other coastal cities. Nationalist leaders spoke out against forced labor, racism, and other abuses, and called for Angolan independence.

Angola officially became an overseas province of Portugal in 1951, but Angolan people faced more mistreatment by Portuguese authorities. After the independence of the Belgian Congo in 1960, a major revolt rocked northern Angola in 1961 and was followed by a long guerrilla war. Of particular issue were land alienation, forced labor, forced cotton cultivation, and deep racial inequities. 

An attack on the prison in Luanda was led by frustrated Creoles. To contain the revolt, the Portuguese deployed large numbers of troops, set up strategic hamlets (forced settlements of rural Angolans), and, by encouraging Portuguese peasants to immigrate to Angola, raised the European population to about 330,000 by 1974. At the same time, they tried to improve relations with Africans by abolishing forced cultivation, forced labour, and the stringent tests to gain assimilated status. They also improved education, health, and social welfare services and protected peasants from land alienation. The economy entered into a period of sustained boom, marked by rapid industrialization and the growth of oil production, and the standard of living rose for both urban workers and rural producers.

However, the armed struggle continued. Three groups of anticolonial guerrillas had emerged but were seriously weakened by disagreement. The divisions between and within these three movements, which at times degenerated into armed conflict, allowed the Portuguese to gain the upper hand by the early 1970s. By the time a military coup in Portugal itself overthrew that country’s dictatorship in April 1974, all three guerrilla movements had been almost entirely expelled from Angolan soil.

The crisis developed into a Cold War battleground as the superpowers and their allies delivered military assistance to their preferred clients. The United States supplied aid and training for both the he National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) while troops from Zaire [Congo]  assisted the FNLA. China, also, sent military instructors to train the FNLA. The Soviet Union provided military training and equipment for The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). During the summer of 1975, the Soviet-supported MPLA was able to consolidate power in Luanda and oust the U.S.-supported FNLA from the capital, but the FNLA continued to attack. The remaining Portuguese troops failed to stem the violence. When MPLA leader António Neto announced November 11, 1975 as the day of Angolan independence, Lisbon decided to withdraw its troops on that day.

The MPLA also had long-established relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Castro had led a communist revolution in Cuba in 1953. Before November 11, the MPLA had negotiated with Castro for Cuban assistance. At the same time, UNITA, which enjoyed U.S. support, approached the Apartheid government in South Africa for military reinforcement [South Africa was dominated by a minority white government that imposed severe, debilitating segregation]. The South African government, with the aim to end the use of Angola as a base for rebels fighting for the independence of South Africa-occupied Namibia, contributed forces that entered southern Angola in October and made rapid progress toward the capital. In response, Castro sent Cuban Special Forces to halt the South African advance and succeeded in drawing attention to the fact that the United States had provided support to a group that now accepted assistance from an Apartheid government.

The U.S. Government had encouraged the South African intervention, but preferred to downplay its connection with the Apartheid regime, particularly as international pressure on South Africa to end Apartheid intensified. However, once South Africa’s involvement became widely known, the Chinese withdrew its advisers from the region, and the Ford Administration was faced with domestic resistance to the U.S. role in the Angolan conflict. President Gerald Ford had requested Congressional approval for more money to fund the operation in Angola. However, many members of Congress were wary of intervening abroad after the struggle in Vietnam, others wished to avoid the South Africa connection, and still others did not believe the issue was important. In the end, Congress rejected the President’s request for additional funds. South Africa withdrew its forces in the spring of 1976 and the MPLA remained as the official government of Angola. Still, Jonas Savimbi and UNITA continued an insurgency until his death in 2002. A peace agreement was finally reached in that year.

Long-standing issues of wealth inequality, widespread corruption, and human rights abuses continued to plague Angola. More than a decade after the end of the civil war, about two-fifths of the country still lives below the poverty line, even though the country has become flush with money from oil production since the war’s end. Billions of dollars that could have gone toward improving the living conditions of Angolans has been lost to corruption over the years via such methods as embezzlement, questionable business deals or partnerships, and kickbacks. Many of the beneficiaries of corruption were high-profile individuals and there have been little or no repercussions to those profiting at the expense of the rest of the country. Angola’s oil-dependent economy was vulnerable to global drops in oil prices, such as those that began in late 2008 and in 2014. Falling oil prices led to considerable budget shortfalls and presented economic challenges; it also highlighted the need for a greater diversification of the economy, which the government has pursued with limited success.

... In 1975, when the Portuguese made a clumsy exit from Angola, the MPLA was already embroiled in a war against two rival movements (the FNLA and UNITA), funded by the CIA, Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo), and the South African apartheid regime - none of whom were keen to see an African, Marxist party take power in oil-rich Angola.

But Fidel Castro knew that the US, reeling from its messy withdrawal from Vietnam, would not be drawn openly into another foreign war. Starting then, the Cuban "Operation Carlota", to support the MPLA, was to change the course of history in southern Africa.

"The Cuban mission was represented as a noble and selfless act of internationalist solidarity with a sister state whose hard-won liberty was under threat from reactionary and, above all, racist forces," says Christabelle Peters, the author of Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick.

"Fidel Castro referred to the ties of blood and history that linked the two nations - a large percentage of the enslaved Africans brought to the island to work on coffee and sugar plantations hailed from Angola. He emphasised that these links placed a burden of debt upon Cubans that they were duty-bound to repay."

Cuba had already been providing low-level support to the MPLA since 1965, when Che Guevara was in the Congo, but from 1975, the game had changed.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez later wrote: "In that fleeting, anonymous passage through Africa, Che Guevara was to sow a seed that no one will destroy."

Almost 450,000 Cubans served in Angola between 1975 and 1991, according to historian Edward George, not only in the military but also as much-needed doctors, teachers and technicians.

...The internecine conflicts within Mozambique, Angola and the DRC, which had been stoked by Cold War powers, were now gathering a momentum of their own.

A large number of foreign countries - at least 36 according to Edward George - intervened in a significant way in Angola's civil war, which did not end until 2002.

But perhaps the most under-covered chapter in this history is how pivotal the Cuban intervention in Angola was in bringing about the end of apartheid rule in South Africa.

Without Soviet and Cuban weaponry, and without Cuba's 50,000 troops, the MPLA would almost certainly not have beaten UNITA and the South African Defence Force at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in 1988.

The defeat fatally undermined the apartheid regime, and Nelson Mandela would declare: "We are deeply indebted to the Cuban people for the selfless contribution they made to the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in our region … we will never forget those who stood by us in the darkest years of our struggle against apartheid."

It is easy to romanticise the "historic friendships" that the USSR, Cuba and Yugoslavia offered African liberation movements and governments...especially with so much information about the era still locked in archives.

The truth is nuanced. The USSR and Cuba's involvement in countries like Angola and Ethiopia has dark episodes too, and has been heavily criticised. Many members of the Non-Aligned Movement (which brought together governments and liberation movements from across the Global South) saw both Soviet and Cuban intervention as another form of colonialism, a sentiment echoed in some accounts from Angola at the time.

The next battlefield over the so-called Reagan Doctrine is the decade-old consensus that America should stay out of the civil war in Angola. Based on the belief that the United States should assist anti-Communist freedom fighters everywhere, elements within the Reagan administration and in Congress are urging that the U.S. supply as much as $200 million in aid to Jonas Savimbi's anti-Marxist guerrilla group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Indeed, advocates of the Reagan Doctrine assert that not to support UNITA is to signal diminished support for anti-Communist movements elsewhere.

How the wheel has turned. In the 1950s and 1960s, American foreign policymakers wondered how best to oppose wars of national liberation. Today they wonder which war of national liberation the United States should support.

The Reagan Doctrine would have us answer: "all of them." The problem this doctrine addresses is a serious one. Since 1975 Communist or Marxist regimes have come to power in South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Suriname. Proponents of the Reagan Doctrine aim to reverse the Soviet Union's gains—but not by deploying American forces. That would be strongly opposed by Congress and the country. (Grenada is the exception that proves the rule.) Rather, the doctrine calls for hoisting the Soviet Union on its own petard by providing support to resistance forces that have sprung up in Marxist-dominated Third World countries. These groups, it is believed, can mount a serious challenge to Soviet-supported regimes and help to shift the "global correlation of forces" in favor of the United States.

The Reagan Doctrine has surefire appeal to those frustrated by the decline in American power over the past four decades. But it is far from obvious that it will advance U.S. interests. The case of Angola demonstrates why the Reagan Doctrine may be less appealing in practice than in theory.

...During the period of the Angolan crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union were still enjoying a brief thaw in their relations, in an era referred to as détente. During this time, Washington and Moscow had reached a series of agreements that aimed to reduce tensions between the two superpowers. However, by 1974, strains on bilateral relations had already compromised U.S. support for détente and the crisis in Angola served to accelerate this trend. From the U.S. point of view, one of the aims of détente was to draw the Soviet Union further into the international system so that Washington could induce Moscow to show restraint in its dealings with the Third World. The Ford Administration believed that Cuba had intervened in Angola as a Soviet proxy and as such, the general view in Washington was that Moscow was breaking the rules of détente. The appearance of a Soviet success and a U.S. loss in Angola on the heels of a victory by Soviet-supported North Vietnam over U.S.-supported South Vietnam continued to erode U.S. faith in détente as an effective Cold War foreign policy.

The U.S. failure to achieve its desired outcome in Angola raised the stakes of the superpower competition in the Third World. Subsequent disagreements over the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan contributed to undoing the period of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States. Additionally, the Angola crisis also ended a recent thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations.