Obama replied. “The Cubans were on the right side of apartheid. We were on the wrong side.” In the 1980s, while Reagan was backing the apartheid government in South Africa, Cuba was fighting a war against its right-wing proxies in Angola. Their decisive 1988 victory in a battle against that racist government at Cuito Cuanavale was, in the words of Mandela, a “turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.”
