“The feelings of culture shock and rejection in this extreme social environment of violence and poverty,” Christine Hatzky writes about Cuban civilians from the education sector who were deployed to Angola in the late 1970s and 1980s, “culminated in personal crises in the forms of homesickness, illness, psychological stress, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness.” She finds evidence of such trauma, cultural shock, and personal crises from “almost all my interviewees” (p. 261).
After the 1974 military coup in Portugal, contending political and military forces fought over power in Angola, hitherto a Portuguese colony, gradually drawing South Africa, Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union, to varying degrees, into a classic pattern of action-reaction escalation as each supported a preferred Angolan faction. In October 1975, after a large contingent of Cuban troops landed in Angola in support for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the South African...