Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński

white and stocky and short. They sat down and the black one took out a pack of Populares, a brand of Cuban cigarettes that I like. They asked if I had ever been in Cuba.
    “Yes, I was there once.”
    “But where?”
    “I was everywhere, in Oriente, in Camagüey, in Matanzas.”
    The black is from Oriente. “It’s beautiful there, right?” he laughs.
    “Beautiful,” I say. “They took me up a magnificent mountain. The view was fantastic.”
    “Have you been south of here lately?” the white asked.
    “Yes, I have.”
    “What’s it like down there?”
    “What’s it like? First tell me who you are.”
    The white said, “We’re from the army. From a group of instructors.”
    This was something new to me—I didn’t know there were Cuban instructors in Angola. In Benguela I had seen a few people in Cuban uniforms, but they wear every conceivable kind of uniform here, whatever they get from abroad or on the front, so I thought they were MPLA soldiers. Now I asked, “Were those guys I saw in Benguela yours?”
    “Yes,” said the black, “ours. We’ve got a dozen or so people there.”
    I said maybe they had come too late, since by my calculations the South African army might already be deep inside Angola. Anyway, what could a dozen or so people do? They were facing a strong regular army. The South Africans had a lot of armor and artillery. They were Afrikaners and Afrikaners know how to fight. And the MPLA had no weapons. I said that Farrusco’s unit had only two mortars and a few old rifles. There were no heavy weapons in Lubango, either. The one armored vehicle that used to be in Benguela had been taken out by the mercenaries. Who could put up any resistance to the armored columns that were coming, or might already have come, from Namibia? Besides, the past weighed heavily on the fate of the war. In this country the black man had lost every war with the white man for five hundred years. You couldn’t change the way people think overnight. The MPLA soldier could whip the FNLA or UNITA soldier, but he would fear the white army coming from the south.
    They agreed that the situation was difficult. We fell silent. It was dark from smoke in the room, and humid. We sat there sweating, tormented by thirst. I was fighting against my imagination because the vision of a bottle of beer or chilled juice with ice or some similar madness kept appearing before my eyes. I asked them if more aid was coming. They didn’t know. It might come, but when and how, nobody could say. They had just arrived and were supposed to train this army, but it wasn’t an army in our understanding of the term. There were loose units scattered around the country. Would there be time to make an army out of them? The enemy was twenty kilometers from Luanda. Mobutu was sending more and more battalions. They might march in tomorrow.
    I led them downstairs. They said that we would have our next meeting at their place, because it was awkward for them to come to the hotel where various people were hanging around. They would send a car for me when the time came. I asked what I was to call them. I was to call the black one Mauricio and the white one Pablo. But if I telephoned it would be better not to use any names; instead, say in Spanish that a friend wanted to meet them. They would see to the rest. In a dark side street stood a covered jeep, new, with no license plates. The hand of someone sitting inside opened the door. They got in and the jeep drove away.
    But there at staff headquarters in Pretoria and later in Windhoek and finally (a small detail) at the front headquarters in Tsumeb, everything was precisely and capably thought out. Maps on the walls: Africa in miniature but still large, from floor to ceiling and from the entrance all along the commander ’s wall, with the uninhabited regions marked in a sandy color. The higher-ranking staff officers at the long tables: experts who know it all inside out.
    The name of the operation: