Cuba Was Always Much More Than a Soviet Satellite State

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Review of Our Comrades in Havana: Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991 by Radoslav Yordanov (Stanford University Press, 2024)

From the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, hardened Cuba-watchers have become wearily familiar with external interpretations of the phenomenon that are consistently underpinned by a wide range of somewhat lazy assumptions. For the most part, those assumptions were originally based on simplifications that the Cold War generated, but they still remain visible long after the geopolitical context has changed beyond recognition. Others simply relied on predetermined readings arising from European or North American theories.

Against that backdrop, Radoslav Yordanov’s Our Comrades in Havana is certainly a welcome contribution. It aims to correct some of the most persistent and unhelpful assumptions about Cuba’s relations with the old Soviet Union and the wider socialist bloc between 1959 and 1991, which depict Cuba as a “client-state” or “puppet” that was dependent on Soviet ideas and priorities.

Instead, Yordanov argues for a more nuanced approach, not least by focusing more than previous researchers on Cuba’s relationship with the bloc countries beyond the Soviet Union. His methodology has been to trawl painstakingly and rigorously through the diplomatic archives of those countries, along with a range of intelligence reports from the former bloc states as well as the US files. He then follows the trajectories of the various inter-state relationships in chronological order, providing us with new revelations and complexities.

In the process, Yordanov demonstrates convincingly that Cuba’s status was by no means that of a totally dependent “puppet” throughout this period, arguing with solid evidence that Cuba’s leaders always followed their own priorities and nationalist instincts, instead of slavishly adhering to Soviet dictates and preferences. He also shows that there were significant differences among the supposedly “client” bloc states in their individual adaptations of ideological strictures. This is something that anyone familiar with the history of those countries during the 1960s and ’70s will already know.

Yordanov demonstrates convincingly that Cuba’s status was by no means that of a totally dependent ‘puppet’ throughout this period. In addition, Yordanov confirms that those states were key players in their own right through their relations with Cuba’s new and developing revolution. Over the whole period, they certainly seem to have made more than a “bit part” contribution. In 1982, for example, they accounted for up to 20 percent of Cuba’s relationship with the whole bloc, providing significant support in the form of training, advice, and infrastructural aid.

The book contains a number of points that verify particular readings of the Revolution’s evolution and external relations. Between 1956 and 1958, the intelligence of the Soviet Union and the bloc states, which was based on the perspectives of Cuba’s communist People’s Socialist Party (PSP), led to a faulty understanding of the guerrilla-led rebellion. This understanding carried on beyond the rebel victory in the belief that, although it was a welcome development, the Cuban Revolution was not (and could not be) truly socialist, partly because its leaders neglected the PSP’s role.

Yordanov argues that Cuba’s internal crisis after 1962 changed the judgements of the bloc states on this question. This was a period during which one PSP leader, Aníbal Escalante, was publicly shamed for seeking to take over the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (ORI), a new political alliance that brought the PSP together with Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. The author errs a little in suggesting that Escalante unilaterally created the ORI: in reality, Castro and the other 26th of July Movement leaders gave him the authority to structure what was seen as the first step toward a single party.

When it comes to the 1962 missile crisis, Yordanov shows that Castro was not the reckless warmonger that many commentators have portrayed him as being. Castro and Nikita Khrushchev always saw the Soviet missiles as a deterrent rather than an offensive military asset, and the US authorities were supposed to know about their presence on Cuban soil, precisely so they could perform such a role. Yordanov’s research also confirms that the anger of Cuban leaders over their exclusion from the US-Soviet agreements in the wake of the Missile Crisis led to years of distrust between Havana and Moscow, although he does not discuss Cuba’s major demand, for an end to US sanctions as part of any settlement, in detail here.

Yordanov goes on to explain that Cuban-Soviet relations grew closer after the failed bid to produce a ten-million-tonne sugar harvest in 1970. In both Cuba and the bloc states, there was a widespread sense that a fundamental rethink of Cuban policies was necessary in the wake of this failure.

Cuba’s involvement in Angola from 1975 was unquestionably conceived of and instigated by the Cuban leadership. The existing literature generally suggests that Cuba’s subsequent shift toward a more “Sovietized” pattern of greater institutionalization and orthodoxy was a prerequisite for receiving increased aid from the USSR and the bloc states, and for Cuba’s entry into the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1972. Yordanov’s research complicates this picture: while the COMECON states had refused membership to Cuba in the early 1960s because of the chaos of its economic policies, it was their unanimous view after 1970 that Cuban membership was crucial for stabilizing those policies, rather than a reward for toeing the line.

As Yordanov shows us, Cuba’s involvement in Angola from 1975, where its soldiers defended the new People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government after independence against rival movements and the South African army, was unquestionably conceived of and instigated by the Cuban leadership. This contradicts the orthodox Western view at the time, according to which Havana was acting at the behest of the Soviet Union.

During the 1980s, in spite of earlier disagreements with Cuba’s insurrectionary approach to Latin America, the leaders and intelligence services of the bloc states made use of Cuban advice on how to understand political developments in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In relation to Nicaragua and Grenada, Cuba was a powerful voice in discussions within the socialist bloc, arguing for the radical movements in those countries to be understood on their own terms. This turns out to have been the case for a wide range of other relationships that Cuba had as well.

There is much for readers to welcome and admire in the book’s research methods and sources, and in its thorough tracing of relations between Cuba and the socialist bloc over the course of three decades. Although most of the findings Yordanov presents are not entirely novel, having previously been documented by other researchers, his volume does us the service of bringing those points together as part of one convincing argument.

However, it has to be said that the book’s strong point — its rigorous use of reports and files — occasionally turns out to be a weakness, probably reflecting the limitations of intelligence reports, which rely for accuracy on the access of informants to key decision-makers, and diplomatic cables. After all, diplomats only talk to each other or to those in and around government circles, so their observations often focus on the arguments at leadership level, as we can see in relation to the events of 1962 or Cuba’s apparent shift between 1968 and 1975 from open defiance of Soviet wishes toward closer cooperation with the bloc.

The focus on what was happening near the top can overlook some important dimensions, most notably at the level of society. For example, membership of COMECON between 1972 and 1990 clearly made a difference to Cuban living standards and the attitude of Cubans toward what many of them would later see as a “golden age.”

Yordanov does identify the key role of educational (and thus also ideological) aid from the bloc states to Cubans studying in those countries. However, he tends to ignore the impact of the wider cultural relationship. In some fields, notably cinema, theater, and the visual and plastic arts, the bloc countries played a part in shaping new cultural ideas, probably more so than the Soviet Union.

Following this line of argument, there is one aspect of the whole relationship that seems a little neglected. Yordanov rigorously traces the relationships that were established at decision-making level, although he focuses almost exclusively on Castro’s role in this area, which is disappointing. Yet he never really gets to grips with the set of ideas that he always refers to as “Marxism-Leninism,” toward which the Cuban leadership appeared to gravitate after 1975. What did that concept actually mean, then and after?

After 1994, as Cuba recovered slowly from the cataclysmic collapse of the socialist bloc, its leaders gave us some helpful clues. They gradually removed the crucial hyphen, most explicitly in the 2019 constitution that separately acknowledged the Revolution’s debt to both Marxism and Leninism. That was because the original term “Marxism-Leninism” had always been shorthand for “Soviet-oriented” or “Soviet-decreed” thinking, which was now rejected in Cuba’s post-crisis search for a socialism whose meaning would be determined by Cubans alone.

Orthodox European Marxists insisted that Cuba’s lack of an advanced capitalist economy meant that an organic movement toward socialism was not yet possible. All of the internal arguments between the PSP and the 26th of July Movement focused on a major point of ideological difference, as did the external debates between Cuban leaders and those of the bloc states, who all agreed with the Soviet interpretation of Cuba’s revolution. On the one hand, there was an established and rigid Soviet interpretation of Marxism, based on Karl Marx’s European knowledge and focus. On the other hand, there were versions of Marxism that took their cue from Lenin’s interpretation of a (capitalist) imperialism that Marx could not have predicted, arguing that Marxism should look toward the new social formations that imperialism had created throughout what would become known as the Third World.

Orthodox European Marxists insisted that Cuba’s lack of an advanced capitalist economy with all of its inevitable contradictions, including the growth of an industrial proletariat, meant that an organic movement toward socialism was not yet possible. In contrast, the Cubans argued that socialism was possible in countries like their own and therefore sought to bring about that outcome. They shared an emerging Third World viewpoint, but also had their own ideological roots in the thinking of earlier Latin American Marxists such as Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui and Cuba’s own Julio Antonio Mella. Che Guevara put forward his own Mariátegui-influenced reading of Marx.

While some readers might consider this to be the modern-day equivalent of an abstruse debate among medieval theologians, it actually went to the heart of the deep differences between Cuba and the socialist bloc. We can only explain those differences in part by reference to the nationalism of the Cubans or the quasi-colonialist determination of what could and should happen in Cuba by the Soviet Union.

It is worth noting that Cuban intellectuals discovered the work of Antonio Gramsci several years before most West European Marxists did, helped by the earlier Spanish translations. This was precisely because Gramsci formed part of the new tendency to push through the door Lenin had opened to new variations of Marxism. This included greater stress on the key role of ideology as one of the basic elements of a revolutionary situation.

This might seem tangential to a review of a book that did not set out to make an argument about these questions. Indeed, the last few paragraphs are not intended as a criticism of what Yordanov might have missed or got wrong. I simply want to observe that, while this study is a welcome addition to our understanding of Cuba’s variegated relationships with the socialist bloc, it ultimately covers those relationships on one particular level. There is another story to be told, and we should congratulate Yordanov for taking us to that point, with another fertile field for researchers to plow.

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