“Seremos (otra vez) como el Che”? Angola as an “alternative narrative” to Cuba in the 1970s

In the summer of 1975, Cuba sent the first troops to Angola in a mission that would change both countries. As Antoni Kapcia states, “despite the more orthodox and apparently ‘Sovietized’ ethos that seemed to prevail in the new institutionalization”, after 1975, and due to the internationalist campaigns in Angola, it was thus possible to “identify the essence of the 1960s Revolution” in Cuba. Resorting to an analysis of popular culture, magazines, as well as documentary film from the period (1975-1979), this article aims at discussing how the Cuban internationalist campaign (both military and civilian) in Angola represented, at home, an “alternative narrative” to the submersion of the country in the quinquenio gris, to the extent that the mobilization of thousands of men and women to Africa allowed Cuba to instigate a national reflection about identity and revolutionary values.