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At the same time this very local conflict was heating up, Cold War tensions across the region were also rising. The superpowers’ grand strategy machinations found each competing for influence in the Horn of Africa, primarily by means of lavishing military aid on local allies. For its part, the Soviet Union sought to create a pro-Soviet alliance of four socialist states—Somalia, South Yemen, Ethiopia (which then included Eritria), and possibly the soon-to-be-independent Djibouti. This alliance was important to the socialist camp, in part, because in 1972 Egypt had ejected Soviet troops and essentially switched to the US-led Cold War camp.5 A socialist alliance in the Horn of Africa would allow the USSR to project power into the Middle East and out over the shipping lanes of the Red and Arabian seas and the Indian Ocean. Consider the strategic importance of this region: the Red Sea, passageway for so much of the West’s oil, linked to the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal; Yemen, sharing a huge border with Saudi Arabia; Somalia, pointing out toward the mouth of the Gulf.6

This “Pax Sovietica” in the Horn of Africa, as worried Western observers called it, was championed in large part by Fidel Castro. In fact, it was Castro who first dragged the USSR into Africa—without asking them, it should be added—by dispatching Cuban troops to aid Angola’s MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola–Partido do Trabalho ), after South African forces, mercenaries, and CIA advisors invaded in 1975. The astounding facts of this strange dynamic were revealed in historian Piero Gleijeses’s Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976.7 After victory in Angola, Cuba prodded the USSR to engage more fully with Africa. Castro took Africa so seriously for several reasons: one was his ideological commitment. Throughout the CIA and State Department documents quoted by Gleijeses, Castro is described as “first of all a revolutionary” and as “a compulsive revolutionary” with a “fanatical devotion to his cause,” motivated by “a messianic sense of mission” and “engaged in a great crusade.” There was also the matter of deep cultural ties between Cuba and Africa. As President Carter’s UN ambassador, the former civil rights activist Andrew Young, told Newsweek, “There is no doubt that Cuba perceives itself as an Afro-Latin nation. . . . I don’t believe that Cuba is in Africa because it was ordered there by the Russians. I believe that Cuba is in Africa because it really has a shared sense of colonial oppression and domination.” It should be pointed out that Young was not championing armed socialist revolution in Africa and ultimately criticized the Cuban crusade as “contributing to destruction.”8

Finally, there was the issue of survival. As one of the first Marxist-Leninist states in the Third World, Cuba needed friends. It needed a balance of power, a swarming of small states to the Red Banner. Just as he had in Angola, so too in the Horn did Castro play a leading role in the architecture and diplomacy of the Soviet strategy. He spoke of “a common anti-imperialist front” on the Red Sea. When the new government of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam, head of the Dergue, embraced socialism, it expelled US military advisors and turned to the Warsaw Pact nations for aid. Soon the Soviet Union was aiding both Somalia and Ethiopia. This infuriated Siad Barre and his clique. The Soviets and Cubans tried to solve the Ogaden question and build unity between all the East African neighbors. Castro personally shuttled back and forth between Somalian and Ethiopian leaders trying to mend fences.

It was not to be. In Mogadishu, world socialism meant less than Greater Somalia. Local agendas derailed the grand plan, and when the strategic vision fell apart, so too did much of the region.

Ogaden War Forever

In the summer of 1977, the secret little war in the Ogaden boiled over. On June 13, about five thousand regular Somali troops, their insignia removed and working