José Eduardo dos Santos: autopsy of an ally & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

Jonas Savimbi had promised many times to shoot down the last Cuban troop plane when it left Angola. That May 23, 1991, on the runway of the “February 4” airport in Luanda, two Soviet IL-62M aircraft were waiting in which the members of the Cuban government delegation sent for the occasion would travel – headed by Commander Juan Almeida —and the last contingent of soldiers that the UN carefully counted up to that day.

There was little expectation to know who would board that last plane. After the hymns and corresponding speeches, President José Eduardo dos Santos bid us farewell with a courteous handshake. It was the last time I saw him.

Almeida then addressed General Samuel Rodilesthe last head of the Cuban military mission, and ordered him – a tone more playful than solemn – using the name by which he was known: “Prikiti, I go in the first. You and the journalist —as he used to call me—, go in the second”.

After a long run on the runway with the lights off and a sharp takeoff, the huge Soviet aircraft sought height with the greatest possible power of its four thunderous engines. Meanwhile, on board, we all silently hoped that Savimbi could not carry out his threat.

More than three decades later, the very concise note that informed Cubans of the official three-day mourning for the death of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos — Africa’s longest-standing ally — omitted at least two relevant pieces of information: he had died at more than seven thousand kilometers from his native Luanda, in an exclusive hospital in Barcelona, ​​where he lived since his departure from power in 2017. And part of his family had denounced his death as a murder, which the Spanish authorities were still investigating weeks after his passing.

African palace conspiracies aside, the truth is that Dos Santos’s voluntary exile in distant Catalonia sought a convenient distance from the monumental corruption scandals that marked the last decades of the thirty-eight years that he ruled Angola with an iron fist.

With a voracity to seize national resources, the Two Saints reigned for more than three decades over the incalculable natural wealth of one of the African countries with the greatest inequality. A long list that includes gold, diamonds, forest resources and rare minerals, as well as gas and oil administered by the state-owned Sonangol.

After the end of the long civil war against UNITA forces, Agostinho Neto’s heir placed many members of his family and friends at the head of institutions, public companies, and other relevant positions when Angola opened up to foreign investment , rapidly becoming Africa’s second largest oil exporter.

José Filomeno de Sousa dos Santos (Zenú), one of the ten children of José Eduardo with six partners —including three marriages—, managed between 2013 and 2018 the more than $ 5,000 million of the important Sovereign Investment Fund, before being sentenced in 2020 to five years in prison for appropriating some $1.5 billion, fraud and influence peddling, although he is still debating his case in Luanda on parole.

Even more notorious, Isabel dos Santos —daughter of the Azerbaijani geologist Tatiana Kukanova, first wife of José Eduardo when she was studying Petrochemical Engineering in Baku in the 1970s— was recognized years ago as the richest woman on the continent and the first African billionaire. Forbes estimated her fortune at more than $3.3 billion, amassed during her presidency of Sonangol and control of the cement industry, telecommunications, retail trade, and juicy transnational investments.

His entry into the administration of the assets of the Angolan state began with the unusual contracting of a Philippine company for the cleaning of the city of Luanda, when Cuban soldiers were still carefully counted by the UN. From the efforts to clean up the capital, the eldest daughter soon went on to control the diamonds and the million-dollar oil concessions.

At their wedding, held in Luanda in 2003, a choir brought in from Belgium sang and the dinner arrived aboard two planes from France. The contrast with the power elite that administered the former Portuguese colony as its own could not be greater, in a country where the majority of the population subsists on less than two dollars a day.

In 2020, the revelations of the journalistic investigation known as Luanda Leaks They estimated that the dynamic businesswoman – educated as a child in London, where she lived with her mother and met her husband, the Zairota millionaire Zindika Dokolo – directed a network of more than 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries, including several tax havens.

In the former Portuguese metropolis, where he had made the largest investments, his assets were frozen, as in Angola. Last year, the United States included her on the blacklist of corrupt personalities and limited her access to visas, without issuing financial sanctions. Accused of multiple crimes, she now spends most of her time in the United Arab Emirates — a favorite refuge of Russian oligarchs and even a Spanish king emeritus. José Eduardo discreetly traveled to Dubai at Christmas 2020 for a family New Year’s Eve with his favorite Isabel.

This was not the expected disaster when he handed over power to his defense minister, General Joao Lourenço, chosen for his supposed loyalty, after approval in Parliament; dominated by the MPLA, of a law that sealed the financial dealings of Dos Santos and his, and assured them, in fact, impunity. The chimera of leaving everything “well tied”.

Joao Lourenço, popularly known as JLOHe did, however, declare a previous anti-corruption campaign shortly after securing the succession. The outgoing president claimed to have left at least $15 billion in state funds, while Lourenço replied that he had only found some empty coffers.

Barely a year after assuming command of the MPLA and the government, JLO he dismissed the hitherto powerful Isabel, prosecuted his half-brother Zenú, and distanced himself from José Eduardo, from whom he feared reprisals and who would use his influence within Angola to support an opposition candidate, representative of UNITA, in the next elections.

There are plenty of reasons for Raúl Castro’s Cuba to avoid commenting on the true course of Angola after independence. The looting of one of the richest countries on the African continent pales the Venezuelan file and the Nicaraguan “piñata”; in a country where the majority of the population subsists on less than two dollars a day.

Nor did Dos Santos stand out for his generosity towards his government’s closest allies. Among the unappealable reasons that determined the Cuban withdrawal -very little wanted by Fidel Castro- in a negotiation sponsored by the United States, was the persistent delay of Angola in the commitment to finance the cost of the troops on the ground, while the Soviet Union assumed their armament and transfer. An equation that left the human replacement in charge of Cuba and that worked with ups and downs for many years, until the arrival at the Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev.

After the timely end of the Cuban military presence, concluded in May 1991, just seven months before the disappearance of the USSR, the Portuguese metropolis occupied a privileged place in the reconstruction of the Angolan armed forces. The generous transactions with the West transformed the economy and political leanings in a process in which Cuba ceased to be an asset to be reckoned with.

Even General Antonio Santa Franca (Ndalu) —“general of generals”, as his peers called him—, especially a friend of the Cuban military and key in the four-party negotiations, would become the first ambassador in Washington and later a member of the board of the diamond consortium De Beersleaving behind the times when he had joined the Cuban soccer team when he was studying agriculture in Pinar del Río.

José Eduardo dos Santos did not come to the aid of Cuba’s ruinous economy in its successive collapses, as the Castro military leadership expected. But neither did he close his door to frequent envoys, such as General Leopoldo Cintras Frías (Polo), who led the Southern Troops Group under direct orders from Fidel Castro in the final days of the Angolan war —although he ended up being suddenly replaced of Minister of the FAR on the eve of the formal withdrawal of Raúl Castro from his positions of power. For a long time, for the smiling Polo, there was nothing to look for in Barcelona.

However, Dos Santos, like the South African Nelson Mandela, appreciated the results for their respective countries of the Cuban military presence in Africa, something that Havana appreciated, in contrast to other beneficiaries of that vital support, such as Sam Nujoma, who forgot to mention Cuba in his speech proclaiming the independence of Namibia, or the Ethiopian Menguistu Haile Mariam, who fled from Addis Ababa defeated, after the withdrawal of Cuban troops from his country and from Angola, to a golden exile in Zimbabwe, no goodbyes.

In the three years that elapsed between May 2, 1988, when the quadripartite negotiations for peace in southern Africa began in London, and the departure of the last plane with Cuban troops to Havana, I participated several times in meetings with an imperturbable José Eduardo in his refuge Futungo of Belason the outskirts of Luanda.

The Angolan president, of a recognized sagacity demonstrated in his many years of power, listened attentively to the reports on the next steps in the peace talks or the progress of the long Cuban withdrawal, trusting in the advice of his advisers and without any gesture that reveal his thoughts. Distant and always impeccable, his impassive face had earned him, among Cubans in Luanda, the nickname of “Barbarito Diez”, due to his parsimony and remarkable physical resemblance to the popular danzone singer.

The unburied body of José Eduardo Dos Santos remains in Barcelona, ​​despite the angry protest of the MPLA government chaired by JLO, which insisted on organizing a state funeral even without the body.

The day before the end of the Cuban military presence, Dos Santos offered a more intimate reception to the members of the delegation, headed by Commander Juan Almeida, who had traveled from Cuba for the occasion. He attended accompanied —in a gesture of unusual deference— by the beautiful former stewardess and model Ana Paula Lemos, with whom he had married a few days before and who would be his last wife and mother of his three children.

Paradoxically, although distanced from José Eduardo, she did not share his voluntary exile in Barcelona. However, she is accused by Tchizé, the third daughter in the patriarch’s complicated family tree, of being part of the conspiracy inspired from Luanda to assassinate him.

The autopsy carried out before the dispute did not resolve the doubts of the family or those of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia, which ordered new investigations until the suspicion of homicide was eliminated.

Meanwhile, the unburied body of José Eduardo dos Santos remains in Barcelona, ​​despite the angry protest of the MPLA government led by JLO, which insisted on organizing a state funeral even without the body. A posthumous tribute designed so that UNITA does not win the elections this wednesday.

And a strange saga for that civil war at the end of the century, which I can’t imagine how it could be explained in the Cuban press.

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