Proxy War at Sea

Abstract

The idea of proxy war was so overworked during the 1950s, particularly in the United States, that the concept later fell into greater academic disrepute than it deserved. Getting other people to do the fighting is, after all, the traditional practice of the richer nations. In the eighteenth century, England and France employed soldiers from many different European countries, usually paying the ruler for the use of his subjects. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the imperial powers could recruit from their colonies, but the British also enlisted, as they and the Indians do to this day, Gurkha soldiers from independent Nepal. This is now something of an exception, for the triumph of nationalism has engendered widespread hostility, right across the political spectrum, to the ancient profession of mercenary soldiering. Governments desirous of having their fighting done by others must nowadays enlist states rather than individuals and, even if some money still passes to rulers, pay a predominantly political price.

Internationalism and its ideals of solidarity and fraternity among peoples form the beautiful essence of Marxism-Leninism. Without internationalism the Cuban revolution wouldn’t even exist. Being internationalists is one way of paying our debt to humanity …. our military cooperation with Angola and Ethiopia was not something new. Cuban soldiers went to the sister republic of Algeria in 1963 to support it against foreign aggression when, in the months following the victory of its heroic struggle for independence, attempts were made to grab a part of its territory. Cuban soldiers went to Syria in 1973 when that country requested our help right after the last war waged against the Zionist aggressors. Cuban fighters fought and died to help free Guinea-Bissau and Angola from Portuguese colonialism — castro¹