Cuba: Tiny Nation Casts Shadow Far Beyond Its Border

Cuban President Fidel Castro long has portrayed himself as an active supporter of revolutionary change in the Third World, extending his sphere far beyond the borders of his small Caribbean nation to help fellow revolutionaries in Central America and Africa.

Cuban doctors, teachers and agricultural specialists have worked in dozens of countries, and Cuban soldiers have helped--and sometimes died for--leftist regimes in Angola, Ethiopia and Nicaragua.

The Cuban presence in these countries has become a political issue, and a sore point with the Reagan Administration. But Castro describes it as the “internationalist duty” of Cubans. He criticizes what he calls the U.S. “tendency to try to prevent all the changes that occur in . . . Asia, Africa and Latin America because they are the product of what is called the ‘international Communist conspiracy.’ ”

The State Department estimates that more than 44,000 Cuban military personnel are stationed abroad, as advisers or in combat units. They include:

Angola: 35,000 (30,000 combat troops; 5,000 advisers).

Ethiopia: 5,500 (2,500 combat troops; 3,000 advisers).

Nicaragua: 2,500 to 3,500 (military and security advisers).

Mozambique: 800 advisers.

Congo Republic: 260 advisers.

Sao Tome: 100 advisers.

Guinea-Bissau: 50 advisers.

Tanzania: 50 advisers.

In addition, the State Department estimates that Cuba has almost 21,000 civilian advisers, technicians and aid personnel abroad, most of whom are trained military reservists (Cuban airport engineers who resisted the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 were in this category). Most of these are health care workers and teachers. About 3,500 of these civilians are in Nicaragua, 200 in South Yemen, and 100 in Afghanistan.

Cuba’s military forces, the State Department says, include an army of 130,000 with 135,000 in the ready reserve; a navy of 13,500; an air force of 18,500. A lightly armed territorial militia intended as a deterrent to possible invasion has an estimated 1.2 million members, and the government has said it wants to expand it to 2 million.

Cuban troops have been in Angola in southwestern Africa for nearly a decade, supporting a Marxist government against South African-backed rightist rebels. They also guard the oil-producing Cabinda region, which supplies oil to the West.

Castro says they were sent there when South Africa, trying to keep the Marxist faction from winning Angola’s civil war after independence from Portugal, moved its forces toward Luanda, the Angolan capital. Their presence has helped snarl the long negotiations over independence for Namibia (South-West Africa), which borders Angola on the south.

In Ethiopia, Cubans helped defeat Somali forces fighting the Ethiopians over the disputed Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in the late 1970s. U.S. officials reported that the Cuban presence was cut in half last year, some returning home, the rest being transferred to Angola.