WORLD : Cuba Lists Foreign War Deaths

Cuba said today more than 2,000 of its soldiers were killed while fighting abroad over the last three decades, nearly all of them in Angola.

The exact figure, which for years was kept a closely guarded secret, was released the day before the bodies of Cuba’s war dead repatriated from foreign battlegrounds were due to be buried in a nationwide day of mourning.

A Defense Ministry statement said a total of 2,289 Cubans died “on civilian and military internationalist missions” in Angola, Ethiopia, and other countries since the 1959 revolution that overthrew a right-wing dictatorship in Cuba and brought Fidel Castro to power.

Of the dead, 863 were killed in direct combat, 597 died from illness and 829 were killed in accidents, the statement said, and 204 were civilians.