Peace had come to Angola by the time I checked into the hotel in Luanda. Independent since 1975 when the Portuguese had abandoned the struggle to keep its grip on a country thirteen times Portugal's size, Angola had celebrated her liberation by plunging into a civil war: MPLA vs UNITA1, the United States and apartheid South Africa vs the USSR and Cuba, with the great powers contending for a stake in Angola's fabulous store of natural resources.
Cuban forces played a seminal role in the eventual triumph of the revolutionary left, the critical moment being the strategic failure of the South African advance at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Military strength played its part in this war as in all others, but what mattered more was a yearning in the hearts of Angolans to shake off the foreign yoke and to breathe the air of freedom, a yearning their Cuban colleagues knew well because they bore in their hearts the Revolution of 1959 and the victory over US mercenaries at Playa Girón in 1961. The US embargo on Cuba was in place then as it is today.
I had walked the streets of Havana, chatted to students, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, carpenters, and agricultural workers in the countryside. Long before then, I had imbibed with my mother's milk a sense of solidarity with the class from which I came, the working class. And so I arrived in Luanda with every good feeling towards the regime. Revolutionary by reputation and rhetoric, I expected it to stand for everything I believed in politically: justice, equality of opportunity, a sharing of resources and of power, public ownership of the things that mattered - education, health, transportation, energy, water...
On the other hand, I wasn't sure what I was doing there. A friend had invited me to work with him on a proposal to the Angolan government to privatise a state-owned bank. Gilberto and I met up in Paris and travelled together to the capital, Luanda, where we joined Gilberto's boss, Miguel Algarrabia Onetti, a Uruguayan who had lived in Angola for many years. Gilberto told me something of Miguel's story. Like Uruguay's former president, José Mujica, Miguel had been a Tupamaro, a left-wing guerrilla fighter in his home country. After the coup in 1973, and the junta's savage campaign to rid itself of opposition, the Uruguayan communist party had spirited some of the prominent Tupamaros out of the country to places where their revolutionary credentials would not be unwelcome. They sent Miguel to Angola and there he had remained.
Gilberto told me that Miguel was now a significant player in the Angolan business world and was also 'in' with the government. He had done well: a fine apartment in Luanda, a house in Geneva and another in Vienna. His children were studying at a private school in England. Nothing Gilberto told me of Miguel coincided with my image of a revolutionary so I filled in the lacunae myself, supposing that a man who had fled the fascist military of his own country must have credentials of which Fidel Castro himself would approve. Nor did I question (was it self-interest?) the purpose of our mission. Privatisation of state-owned enterprises seemed a bit too Thatcherite for a government that had fought for years against the highest representatives of neoliberal capitalism. Still I played down the implicit message. In short, I gave everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. History couldn't deceive and the MPLA government couldn't betray its principles.
Miguel joined us for dinner on our second evening and I put the question to him. Short, energetic, voluble, he lacked the traditional beard of the guerrilla fighter but retained the casual manner, addressing me as compañero and greeting me with a fraternal embrace.
"We don't know how to run banks," he explained. " And internationally, who would trust an Angolan bank? Privatisation is our only recourse."
He left the next day on a business trip to Europe and I didn’t see him again for several years. But he placed his offices in Luanda at our disposal and gave us a car, a driver and a secretary. We wrote a proposal in clumsy Portuguese and presented it at a meeting with a government minister that Miguel had arranged for us.
The minister worked from a shiny government building patrolled by armed guards and decorated with young women in tight clothes. Small and dapper, he sat behind a polished wooden desk bare except for a telephone and a tortoise-shell ashtray. A large gold watch on his wrist matched thick gold rings on the third finger of each hand. There was no filing cabinet, and the bookcase behind his chair was empty. He showed no interest in anything we had to say and the meeting barely lasted half of its allotted fifteen minutes.
Afterwards, as we waited outside the building for our driver, we saw the minister on his way out. He was seated in the back of a limousine, a young woman close by his side.
With time on our hands, we asked our driver to show us the city. He told us there was nothing to see, but I insisted.
"There must be a bookstore. I'd like to buy a book on your country."
"There used to be bookstore, sir. Not sure it's still there."
We drove through the old downtown area. On the kerbsides, vendors sold clothing, plastic goods, vegetables, furniture, lamps, pots and pans that had seen better days and had doubtless been left behind by the departing Portuguese. Abandoned stores lined the streets, their entrances piled with garbage. Pedestrians strolled aimlessly. Old men with bloodshot eyes squatted on sidewalks.
The bookstore was open but the shelves were empty save for a scattering of magazines. A painfully thin attendant shrugged his shoulders when I asked him why the store had no books. He probably considered it a stupid question.
Outside, a gang of ragged teenagers had gathered round our vehicle. They begged us for money and our driver waved them away with angry words. Before we pulled away, one of the gang engaged me with his eyes. Something in them drew my sympathy. I wound down my window, and felt for my wallet.
"Don't give him anything," Gilberto warned. "It's bad for them. They get into the habit of begging from strangers."
I let the wallet fall back into my pocket. Seeing my gesture and change of mind, the youngster gave me a look that has haunted me to this day. It reflected pain, abandonment, hatred of the foreigner and of the rich who live well and know nothing of deprivation. It spoke of the cruelty of the world and its disregard for the weak and vulnerable; and above all it conveyed hunger, the relentless hunger that gnaws without hope in the heart of the innocent.
Angola is a land of oil and diamonds. Merchants, speculators and oilmen occupy the capital’s luxury hotels and take the first-class seats on flights to and from Europe and America. An old, familiar drama plays out there of a rich country filled with poverty and despair. Nothing can ever excuse my failure - which is also our failure - to give succour to a hungry child. No lesson should come at such cost.
Note: Two names in this piece have been changed for security reasons.
1 MPLA - People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA - National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.
