Cubans in the Congo

[bayonetbrant]

h/t to Mosher, who shared this on FaceBook.  Excellent article

Anniversary recalls Congo rescue by Miami Cubans

Fifty years later, the Congo jungle now receding into the mists of memory as he sits in a Miami living room, Juan Tamayo is looking forward to meeting the little blond girl who sat so silent and still in his lap while he blazed away belt after belt of ammo with his .30-caliber machine gun.

"Does she hear OK?" he wonders softly. "I always worried that her hearing was damaged."

A thousand miles north in Nashville, the little blond girl — now a 54-year-old college administrator whose hearing is perfectly fine — is excited at the prospect of meeting the man who kindly draped his kerchief over her head to protect her from the hot cartridges showering from his machine gun. Even though she's going to have to admit in embarrassment that for nearly five decades, she thought he was a mercenary.

"I never had any idea he was from the CIA," Ruth Reynard says with a laugh. "At the age of 4, I don't think I knew what the CIA was. And a Cuban! Imagine that — a Cuban in the Congo."

Scores of survivors of one of the Cold War's strangest and least-known chapters — a vicious, bloody proxy war in Africa between rival Cuban armies supported by the United States and the Soviet Union — will gather Sunday in Miami for a reunion.

More than 200 people, including family members, are expected at the event. They'll include not only CIA shadow warriors who've spent a lifetime keeping quiet about what they did, but more than a dozen members of hostage missionary families they rescued during the conflict's single most dramatic moment.

"When I first heard about the rescue at Kilometer 8, chills went down my spine," says Janet Ray, daughter of a CIA pilot killed at the Bay of Pigs and the organizer of the reunion. "I just think it's tragic that these men have never gotten the recognition that they're due."

The CIA sent about 120 Cuban exiles to fight communist-backed guerrillas during the political violence that wracked the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1962-67, says Frank R. Villafaña, author of Cold War in the Congo, virtually the only history of the role of Cubans in the conflict. Fidel Castro supplied about 200 soldiers to the other side.

waaaay more at the link

[GDS_Starfury]

Cubans and congo you say...

[Staggerwing]

Cubans and congo you say...

Looks like Tripod doesn't want you skimming off all their webbzy awesomes.

[Martok]

Fascinating stuff!  I'd never heard of this story before.