Brazzaville appears as both a political refuge and a practical supply point for the MPLA: a city where the movement established an external base and made its first contacts with Cubans, and later a place from which ammunition was flown toward besieged Angolan forces.

MPLA headquarters and Cuban contacts

After the government of Zaïre forced the MPLA headquarters out of Kinshasa, where it had been based since leaving Luanda in 1961 amid Portuguese repression, the organization moved its seat first to Conakry and then to Brazzaville. From 1965, a Cuban military unit of about one hundred people was based in Brazzaville as a security force for the president of the Republic of the Congo. The city was also where the MPLA first established contacts with Cubans, linking its political exile to a relationship that would become significant in the Angolan conflict.

A wartime supply point

Brazzaville retained a concrete role in the later war. Ruiz, the pilot of the MPLA’s only aircraft in Luanda, flew there to collect ammunition before carrying supplies onward to besieged cities in Angola’s borderlands. The aging DC-3 was indispensable: it delivered cartridge boxes and flour and returned serious casualties to Luanda. In a country where transport and communications had broken down, Brazzaville thus formed one link in a fragile air route on which isolated garrisons—and the defense of Luanda—depended.