It is true that the sins of the father should not be visited upon the children. That saying acquired new relevance in recent days, and it is time to revisit this particular aphorism.

The newly elected far right president of Chile, Jose Antonio Kast, faces renewed criticism because of the fact that his father, a German immigrant, was a Nazi party member and officer. So what you may say; surely Kast does not need to face generational judgements because of the sins of his father?

That much is true, but this popular wisdom should not undermine our ability to ask the difficult questions. Providing sanctuary for refugees is a noble goal. It is one of the standards by which we evaluate the humaneness of a given society.

It is in this connection that we should explore the following juxtaposition; after World War 2, Cuba showed solidarity to black African nations fighting for their independence from colonialism. At the same time, the United States, Britain and other Anglophone nations provided sanctuary to ex-Nazis and their Eastern European collaborators fleeing justice.

Molly coddling ex-Nazis is not a practice specific to Latin American nations. The US, Canada and other Anglophone nations have a longstanding history of opening their borders to Nazis, white immigrants considered acceptable refugees. I have explored this topic at some length previously.

The subject of visiting the crimes of the parent on the children is something I have been wrestling with for decades. In 1993, former US President Bill Clinton nominated General John Shalikashvili (pronounced Sha-Lee-kash-vee-Lee) to be the chairman of the US Joinr Chiefs of Staff. That basically means the head honcho of the entire US armed forces.

It is always great to see the child of immigrants make it big in the US. What is interesting about this particular episode is that the general’s father, Dimitry Shalikashvili, was a member of the Georgian Legion, an ultranationalist Georgian unit under the operational command of the Nazi Waffen-SS. He fought in this unit as an officer, finding sanctuary in the United States at the conclusion of the world war.

There is no suggestion that Shalikashvili junior was a Nazi or member of the Ku Klux Klan. However, we must ask the obvious question; how did an officer in the Waffen-SS, an organisation proscribed by the Nuremberg trials as a criminal group, find refuge in the United States?

I have previously recounted how the US, Canada and other western nations turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe, but provided sanctuary for ex-Nazis after the end of the war. Rather than recycle the details of that long-ignored undercurrent of Cold War history, let’s focus on two important historical anniversaries which will help us understand the contrasting behaviours of the US and Cuba.

This year, November to be exact, marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban intervention in Angola. The latter, a newly independent nation after the withdrawal of Portuguese troops, faced a relentless and covert war of terrorism waged by Angolan proxies of apartheid South Africa. If there was a racist regime in the world, it was the racially stratified society of apartheid South Africa.

Beginning in the 1970s, the South African (and American) backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) waged a terrorist campaign to sabotage the newly won independence of that nation. It seemed like Angola would fall, and so the authorities asked for Cuban help.

Thousands of Cuban soldiers, fighting alongside their Angolan counterparts, drove the South African army out of Angola, and also from Namibia, another nation targeted by apartheid South Africa. This is an example of Cuba’s internationalism, helping to hasten the eventual demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The military defeat of the South African forces in Angola was a setback from which Pretoria never fully recovered.

Operation Carlota, as the Cuban mission was called, is fondly remembered until today as an example of interethnic solidarity.

Keep that in mind, as we explore another milestone. This year marked the 50th anniversary of the passing of Spain’s former military dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Hitler and Mussolini were both dead in 1945. Franco, whose regime came to power after a three year civil war, received substantial funding and military assistance from the Axis powers.

Franco stayed in power over the decades. Spain under his command sent 40 000 troops to fight alongside German forces in the Soviet Union; the so-called Blue Division. How did he remain in power for over 30 years?

There are many answers to that question, but one major reason is the support and international backing provided by the United States. The Cold War was on, and the US required allies in Western Europe. After the conclusion of WW2, there was a concerted effort in the US and Western Europe to rehabilitate Franco’s reputation.

He was regarded as a stable ruler, one who promoted a conservative national Catholicism. Indeed, the Nobel Prize winning novelist anti-Soviet Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, led the charge to rehabilitate Franco’s reputation not as a pawn of the Axis powers, but as a staunch Catholic who ‘saved Spain from communism.’ How exactly he rescued Spain by killing thousands of his fellow Spaniards is never explained by Solzhenitsyn.

That is true as far as it goes, but it is only half the story. Franco’s regime advocated a vicious antisemitism, kept Republican prisoners in concentration camps, and his record of actively siding with Hitler was underplayed.

German U-boats refilled their tanks and replenished their stocks in Spanish ports. Texaco, the American oil company, provided information about the movements of Allied commercial shipping to Franco’s government. Rather than ‘keeping Spain out of the war’ as Franco’s apologists would have us believe, Nationalist Spain participated in the Nazi war effort. Leon Degrelle, a Belgian wartime Nazi collaborator, Waffen-SS officer and fugitive, found sanctuary in Franco’s Spain after 1945.

The purpose of juxtaposing these episodes is to cast a spotlight on little-known areas of modern history. We reveal our characters when we become known by the friends we keep.