Cuba's domestic dynamics as well as its foreign policy and activities on a global scale have defied conventional wisdom on opportunities open to poor countries, or to countries relegated to the global periphery of the world order. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 must hence be placed in its correct historical context if we are to understand the foreign policy that the Cuban state leadership has adopted since 1959, and its central focus on Africa in order to develop a proletarian internationalist foreign policy. Cuba's policy toward Africa in particular, an economically marginalised continent facing a number of domestic constraints, and its general development of an internationalist foreign policy aimed at assisting governments in the Third World, form a challenge to those assumptions.

Between 1975 and 1988 there were in total over 70 000 Cuban aid workers and skilled professionals such as physicians, nurses, agricultural specialists and other professionals providing their services in Africa. Moreover, over 40 000 Africans have studied in Cuba, with all expenses paid by the government of Cuba. According to these estimates, it is evident that Cuba has played a significant role in recent African history, the extent of which is still to be fully assessed.

From the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Cuba's aid to Africa took the form of development assistance, and numerous scholarships were offered to African students in order to pursue their education in Cuba. The new international order had serious implications for Cuba's social and economic development, but the overall aims and policy towards states and people in the global South remained largely the same and programmes of assistance continued despite economic difficulties. Cuban military programmes accompanied those of technical and medical assistance, with volunteers assisting in the field of health care, education and construction in Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Ethiopia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tanzania, Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Equatorial Guinea.

The history of Cuba in Africa largely remains to be written. In the historiography of the African liberation struggles or in foreign policy analysis, Cuba's foreign policy towards African states is often absent, simplified or overlooked as a mere proxy affair, and in effect marginalised.