Somewhat amazingly, Radoslav Yordanov’s excellent new monograph, Our Comrades in Havana: Cuba, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991, reads as three things at once. First, Yordanov’s work is a history of post-revolutionary Cuba as its leadership sought to design a unique Cuban road to socialism. Second, it is a careful diplomatic history of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the “island of freedom” as mediated through east European officials. Here Yordanov’s work joins an important and growing body of scholarship on relationships between the Second World and the Global South. Finally, Yordanov charts the course of an exhilarating, and doomed, romance. Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic saw in the other a path to a better future. Yordanov’s is a story of discovery, the awakening of new revolutionary dreams, shattering disappointments, reconciliations, and ultimately, separation. It is an important work that deserves wide readership.
At its root, Comrades in Havana is a story about attempts by communist officials in Havana, Moscow, Budapest, Sofia, and other communist capitals, to fuse together the two great revolutionary impulses of the twentieth century—revolutionary Marxism and national liberation movements—to create an alternative, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial global order. From the beginning, crafting this revolutionary global order called for a balancing of a dizzying array of interests: the tensions between new and old revolutionary states, between proponents of “rational and scientific” approaches to economic development (those who sought to bring in record sugar harvests with revolutionary enthusiasm), and tellingly, fierce debates between would-be comrades about what revolution, exactly, they were fighting to bring about. Yordanov traces their intersection with an impressive display of scholarly muscle, using, by my count, archives in twelve countries and ten languages.
Few were sure what to make of Fidel Castro’s revolution when it came to power in January 1959. Castro was the son of a wealthy landowner and a relatively uninspired, and self-described politically naïve, law student at the University of Havana. Castro was outraged by the corruption and poverty of Cuban society and by the outsized, neo-colonial role that the United States played in the political and economic life of the country. He was also willing to throw himself into risky, romantic political adventures. In 1953, he led a group of 165 revolutionaries to attack the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack failed, but Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me,” speech given at his trial became the foundation of his successful revolution in 1959. The speech, and following program, was rooted in the revolutionary nationalist writing of José Marti rather than Karl Marx. National independence was the guiding principle.
Communists in Cuba were suspicious of Castro’s bourgeois origins, and communists in eastern Europe were unsure what to make of the bearded revolutionaries emerging from the Sierra Maestra mountains, rather than the shop floor or revolutionary intelligentsia. East European diplomats were the first representatives of the Second World to take the temperature of the Cuban revolution, to sus out its Marxist credentials. Initially they were rather unimpressed, understanding the Cuban revolution as an attempt to develop a “utopian-romantic, ideal type socialism.” There was, however, something there. By 1960, Nikita Khrushchev had reached the conclusion that though Castro was not a communist, “US actions would sculpt him so that in the end he would really become a communist” (22). These first impressions were telling and shaped all that came after.
It was Castro’s attempt to limit the role of American capital in the economic life of Cuba (a role Castro attributed to the continuing legacy of colonialism) that did much of this work. As Yordanov notes, trade with the US amounted to 70% of Cuba’s total commercial exchanges. To reduce this imbalance, in February of 1960 Cuba and the Soviet Union signed their first agreement trading Cuban sugar for Soviet oil (at rates highly favorable to Cuba). This was to become the lifeblood of the relationship from beginning to end. From here things fell into a predictable Cold War pattern. In July the US rejected the importation of Cuban sugar for the rest of the year. In return, the Cuban government seized American-owned sugar mills and began the process of nationalizing large landholdings. By month’s end Ernesto “Che” Guevara had announced the “Marxist” character of the Cuban revolution.
The culminating event in this convergence of interests was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, in which US-supported Cuban exiles sought to overthrow the Castro regime. The invasion was beaten back, in part, by the large shipment of munitions from Czechoslovakia, and the ultimate impact of the failed invasion was to demonstrate both the fragility of the Cuban revolution in the face of American attempts to overthrow it, and the pivotal role that aid from the second world could play in defending the revolution.
Again, what revolution? A strength of Yordanov’s monograph is that it demonstrates revolutionaries in Cuba, in eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union had very different ideas about the world they were fighting to bring about. Because of their own historical experiences of colonialism and proximity to the US, the leading capitalist power, Cuban revolutionaries prioritized national sovereignty above all else and demonstrated a real, and often independent, commitment to national liberation movements across Latin America and Africa. Second World diplomats fretted about the “immaturity” of Cuban economic planning and the “revolutionary adventurism” of Castro’s foreign policy. From Castro’s perspective, these Soviet and east European policy advisors were less “revolutionaries, than the grandchildren of revolutionaries” (72), more concerned with their own standards of living and economic development than the plight of those oppressed by global capitalism. Because of their historical experience, and ideological proximity to the Soviet Union, east European diplomats were well placed to serve as a nexus point for these interests. East European diplomats and experts positioned themselves as patient instructors on the perils and possibilities of real existing socialism—with their pragmatic commitment to planned development.
These goals often worked at cross-purposes. The relationship soured in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, when Khrushchev agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba without consulting Castro, enraging the Cuban leader, who believed it demonstrated a lack of commitment to the defense of Cuban independence. Paradoxically, this perceived lack of Soviet commitment to the defense of the Cuban revolution freed Castro to both build his own path to communism and to export the example of the Cuban revolution across Latin America. Cuban support for the tri-continental and non-aligned movement flew in the face of a unified, Soviet-led socialist bloc and attempts at peaceful coexistence with the west. East European diplomats struggled to define Cuban communism—describing it as “eclectic-pragmatic mixture of petit-bourgeois, ultra-left adventurism, nationalist arrogance, Trotskyist and Chinese conceptions, and Western European neo-Marxist theories” (56). Attempts by East European delegations to develop the planned economy met with exasperated incomprehension.
The storm broke in 1970 with the failure to meet targets for sugar production (the goal was ten million tons—only 8.5 million tons was produced with only 5.9 million tons in 1971). Economic failure curbed Cuban independence. To guide economic development, Cuba was brought into the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance in 1972. Second World experts traveled to Cuba to teach the lessons of their experience. By 1983, 87% of Cuba’s foreign trade was with CMEA countries and Soviet subsidies to the Cuban economy was more than $8 million daily.
What was this aid for? What was the Cuban revolution for? This is Yordanov’s most important contribution. Soviet officials understood Cuba as an important beachhead into the Third World: proof of concept that national liberation movements were compatible with, indeed inseparable from, global socialist revolution. East European officials understood Cuba as a space to test (and teach) revolutionary principles, but most importantly, they understood Cuba as a market. They sought to ground relations between their nations on “trade principles”: speaking to Todor Zhivkov, Castro complained that Bulgarian delegates were behaving more as “traders than revolutionaries” (88). East European models of objective economic principles, trade, and Soviet subsidies stabilized the Cuban economy (Yordanov notes that the Cuban economy grew 11.9% from 1971–75). Castro proceeded to use this economic breathing space to send Cuban military aid to Angola and Ethiopia (Yordanov notes that 50,000 Cuban military and civilian experts served in Africa in the mid-to-late 1970s, costing approximately .7% of the GNP). This aid expanded in the 1980s once more into Latin America. There were as many as 16,000 Cuban military personnel in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s). For Castro, these revolutions were the natural extension of the Cuban revolution; socialist internationalism was the point.
Castro expected that the leaders of the fraternal revolutionary states in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were part of the same struggle. The support from Europe was never enough, in fact it became more and more difficult as the economies of the Second World cratered in the 1980s, and Castro was aghast to find his interlocutors more interested in questions of standards of living and deficits than revolutionary struggle. Eventually connection to Second World markets and aid evaporated completely with the collapse of communism in 1989–91 (leading to the adoption of the Special Period in the Time of Peace when Cuba’s GNP contracted by nearly 35%). In the end it was he who questioned their revolutionary credentials, or as Yordanov puts it, “the students outperformed the teachers” in their commitment to revolutionary ideals and Marxist principles (221).
