Avenging Carlota in Africa: Angola and the memory of Cuban slavery

Fidel Castro's meta-narrative of Cuban history emphasizes the struggle – and eventual triumph – of the oppressed over their oppressors. This was epitomized in Nelson Mandela's 1991 visit to the island, when his host took him to the northwestern city of Matanzas, and the pair gave speeches titled “Look How Far We Slaves Have Come!” The use of Matanzas as a site of public political memory began in 1843, and the memory of slavery soon became a surrogate for Cuba's flawed liberation movement. One-hundred and fifty years after the execution of Carlota, one of the enslaved leaders of the Triumvirato Rebellion in Matanzas, Cuba began Operation Black Carlota in Angola. Castro had come to power 20 years earlier and publicized his own storming of a former slave – and by then prison and Army – barracks at Moncada in Santiago. The naming of the mission, and the subsequent emphasis on slaves overcoming their neo-colonial “masters,” illustrates the vividness of Cuban memories of slavery, as well as its emotional resona...