Twenty-five years ago in the forgotten world of the cold war, Ronald Reagan's United States and its allies in apartheid South Africa suffered a stunning military defeat by Fidel Castro's Cuba in the devastated remote Angolan town of Cuito Cuanavale.

It changed the history of the region and the continent. It is hard to recapture from this distance the extraordinary audacity of the Cuban Communist Party central committee's decision on November 16 1987 to reinforce the 25,000 troops already in Angola by dispatching another 9,000 men, including their best pilots, with the best planes, the most modern tanks and the most sophisticated anti-aircraft equipment the island possessed from the Soviet Union to help the Angolan army counter a South African military build-up on Angola's southern border.

For eight months the South Africans had been preparing a major invasion to expand their client Jonas Savimbi's destructive reach against the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) government from his toehold in the south of Angola.