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A Sports Dispute Started the Cuban Missile Crisis and Other Odd Facts

Khalid Elhassan October 28, 2019 31 min

35. The Use of Baseball Diamonds to Rally Allies

Cuban advisors remained in Angola until the 1980s, their presence readily identifiable to US satellites because of their tell-tale baseball diamonds. American diplomats often used that evidence to rally support for the US position, and against that of the Eastern Bloc. America’s then-ambassador to Tanzania used to pass aerial photos of baseball diamonds to convince Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, of Cuba’s presence in neighboring Angola.

As ambassador David C. Miller put it: “You would show Julius [Nyerere] examples of satellite photography of Angola … and then point out that the overhead photography keeps turning up baseball diamonds all over Angola. We know that they’re Cubans playing baseball“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.