Cubans will remain in Angola as long as they wish." So said Angolan President Agostinho Neto, expressing gratitude to Premier Fidel Castro for sending an estimated 20,000 troops and 4,000 civilian technicians to his country. Neto had good reason to be thankful. Without Havana's help — not to mention about $2 million a day in Soviet aid — the Marxist regime in Luanda would probably not be in power today.
Three years ago, Neto's Moscow-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.) appeared to have won control of the former Portuguese territory in a bloody civil war against two Western-supported independence groups: Holden Roberto's National Front for the Liberation of Angola (F.N.L.A.) and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). In fact, the civil war never really ended, and Neto's Popular Movement government, even with Cuban assistance, has not been able to establish jurisdiction over a country that is larger than Britain, France, Portugal and West Germany combined.
In the far northern district of Cabinda, which is separated from the rest of Angola by a 20-mile strip of Zaïre, guerrillas of the small Front for the Liberation of the Cabinda Enclave (F.L.E.C.) are fighting for independence. Unfortunately for the F.L.E.C.'s chances, the squabbling Cabindans are split into three factions; moreover, according to Western intelligence estimates, several battalions of Cubans have been deployed in Cabinda to protect the offshore oil wells that currently provide most of Angola's revenues. Farther south, surviving units of the F.N.L.A. also harass government forces in occasional skirmishes, even though Holden Roberto, 55, now stays mainly in Zaïre. President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre provided much of the F.N.L.A.'s support during the civil war. The Luanda regime may have encouraged the Katangese invasion of Shaba region partly out of vengeance.
Neto's most dangerous opposition is in the south, where UNITA not only fights on but even seems to be gaining a little under the bearded Savimbi, 43, a onetime philosophy student at Switzerland's University of Lausanne. He commands a ragtag army of 5,000 regulars and 12,000 auxiliary bushfighters that includes women and boys barely in their teens. Supported by the Ovimbundu tribe, which makes up about 40% of Angola's population of 6.2 million, Savimbi's forces now control a third of the country. They have gained an advantage by staging successful hit-and-run raids, involving small commando groups of 25 men, to keep government forces off guard.
The UNITA commandos periodically cut the Benguela railroad that formerly carried Zaïrian and Zambian ore to the seaport at Lobito. The sabotage has deprived Angola's government of $100 million a year in rail revenues. UNITA'S guerrilla attacks have also disrupted diamond mining, as well as farming in the Huambo district, which is Angola's main granary. The country's only sizable revenue (about $700 million last year) comes from oil rigs in Cabinda that are operated under Cuban protection by the Gulf Oil Corp.