← Back to the front page

Incompetence That Shaped History

Khalid Elhassan March 9, 2020 33 min

Nineteenth century Washington Metropolitan Police Force officers. Washington Metropolitan Police

2. ‘Beisbol‘ Diamonds Remained an Easy Tell Throughout the Cold War

Fidel Castro visiting Cuban troops in Angola. YouTube

The Cubans’ love of baseball made baseball diamonds a ubiquitous part of their island’s landscape. That allowed American aerial photo analysts to guesstimate the amount of Cuban activity in an area by counting the number of baseball diamonds there. And since Cubans played baseball wherever they went, baseball diamonds on a landscape became an easy tell, allowing analysts to determine that Cubans were present.

After Angola gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, Cuban military advisors were sent to the newly independent country. They supported the socialist Movimento Popular de Libertecao de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA) against rival factions supported by the US and apartheid South Africa. American eyes in the sky were able to track Cuban presence by the presence of baseball diamonds.

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.