An incredible, first-hand account of Eritrea’s 30-year war of liberation from Ethiopia.

What really struck me about this book is the remarkable ideological and organizational similarities between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), whose leader and the current President of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, received political and military training in China in 1967, and Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement in Cuba, as described by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy in “Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution”. This makes it all the more puzzling to me why the Soviet Union and Cuba would back Ethiopia’s brutal annexation of Eritrea, which, according to the author’s description and Professor Awet Tewelde Weldemichael in his book (which I am reading) “Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation: Eritrea and East Timor Compared,” was comparable in its brutality, if not in scale, to Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of East Timor under Suharto. I look forward to reading “Ethiopia’s Revolution” by the Cuban journalist Raul Valdes Vivo, hopefully to better understand the ‘other side’ of the Eritrean Revolution: the socialist revolution in Ethiopia and its Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist-Leninist government that continued the feudalistic monarch Haile Selassie’s war against Eritrea.

Before reading this book I often felt like most Western Marxists have shamefully neglected to study the Eritrean Revolution, sometimes, I feel, because Eritrea is too distant or ‘African’ to be considered important, unlike, say, Cuba or Vietnam. Now that I have read this book, I feel even more strongly that this is the case. ( )