Cubans’ memories of the Civil War in Angola
Thursday, 05/14/2026-, 02:00 pm-

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Cost: free

Join us for the first of two webinars this spring that explore silenced memories of the war and the challenges—personal, methodological, and artistic—to unearthing the conflicted legacies of what some have called “Cuba’s Vietnam.”

Late 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Cuba’s military intervention in Angola, a major conflict of the late Cold War. From 1975 until 1991, over 300,000 Cuban troops, backed by the Soviet Union, supported the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government’s efforts to thwart rival contenders for power backed by the United States and the invading army of apartheid-era South Africa. Thousands of Cuban educators, physicians, and other professionals also completed tours. Yet many of their stories of trauma, dislocation, and hardship remain buried under celebratory narratives of “internationalism” that focus largely on the conflict’s geopolitical outcomes.

In our first event, anthropologist Katrin Hansing, who is writing a book based on long-term ethnographic research and interviews with Cuban veterans of the conflict, will engage in a dialogue with Lisbon-based Cuban author Karla Suárez, whose fiction has explored the impact of Angola on Cuban society in the 1970s and 1980s.

The presentation will be followed by a Q&A with the online audience. This conversation will be conducted in both English and Spanish languages.