- 15/05/2025
In the 1950s and ‘60s, in a clear turn from Stalin’s methods, the Soviets planned to win developing countries over to communism by the shining example of the Soviet Union and by its direct help. But reality turned out to be a bit more complicated. Explore the complex relationship between the Soviet Union and Cuba—as well as its burgeoning rivalry with China.
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00:00It is so easy to fall in love with Cuba, set amid the Caribbean seas, and with people of
00:24such amazing spirit. In 1960, Anastas Mikoyan, a high Soviet official, journeyed for the first
00:33time to Cuba and was totally smitten with what he saw and how it made him feel. Mikoyan was a senior
00:41Bolshevik of Armenian origins who had worked closely with Lenin and Stalin. Now he was first
00:47deputy premier of the Soviet Union and a close friend of the premier Nikita Khrushchev, and he
00:53had been specially invited to visit Cuba by Fidel Castro. When the first Soviet diplomats had
00:59arrived in Havana in 1959, the new leader Castro had stunned them by avowing that Marx and Lenin
01:06were his inspirations, forming his thought, and he invited Mikoyan to visit right away. The Soviets
01:14were skeptical of Castro's theoretical knowledge of Marxism and knew little of the new Cuba. But
01:20Mikoyan made the trip in February 1960. His meeting with Castro took place in Castro's fishing cabin in
01:28the wilderness. In this tropical paradise, the living was plain, simple, Spartan. The Soviets and Cubans
01:36fished, grilled what they caught, slept on the ground, and talked. Among these revolutionaries,
01:43Mikoyan felt he had gone back in time to his own youthful radicalism and fiery commitment. He
01:51announced, yes, this is a real revolution, just like ours. I feel as though I have returned to my youth.
02:00He signed a trade agreement to buy Cuban sugar and provide oil at subsidized prices, along with a
02:07sizable loan for Cuban economic development. The love affair was blossoming. Later, Mikoyan would
02:15insist to the American Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, you Americans must realize what Cuba means to us
02:21old Bolsheviks. We've been waiting all our lives for a country to go communist without the Red Army.
02:28It has happened in Cuba, and it makes us feel like boys again.
02:33Mikoyan's stirring emotions were part of a larger picture. In the late 1950s and 1960s,
02:41the Soviets hoped that an expanding number of countries would move towards alignment with
02:46communism under Soviet patronage. The goal of international communism, the hope for a worldwide
02:53worker struggle, had always been central to the program. But under Khrushchev, the internationalist
03:00character of the ideology was given new emphasis, especially in a bid for what was called the
03:07Third World. In the aftermath of the Second World War, nationalist and anti-colonial movements
03:14worldwide won independence from European colonialist rule. Many of these new states and leaders felt the
03:22appeal of the Soviet model of modernization and the promise of fast progress, even if their own
03:29local conditions were far from those Marx had envisioned for the victory of an industrial
03:34working class. Khrushchev looked back to Lenin's earlier concept of diverse national revolutionary
03:41paths to advance on the front of least resistance. But whatever the different context, the Soviets
03:48offered their own Marxism-Leninism as the one formula for victory. Khrushchev now avowed peaceful
03:57coexistence with the rest of the world, a sharp break from Stalin's closed attitude. Khrushchev's new
04:04policy implied that the Soviet Union need not clash directly with the capitalist world, but might win
04:11developing countries over by the sheer force of its example and its help. Crucially for the Soviets,
04:19patronage also meant recognition for their vanguard status, their leading position.
04:25This would be a factor when the Soviet Union and China broke their earlier fraternal alliance by 1961
04:33and grappled with each other in intensifying rivalry. Each state now made a bid to lead the world
04:41communist movement. Both the Soviets and the Chinese were optimistic and triumphal, even as they
04:48competed for the leadership of the Third World. In spite of internal contradictions and tensions that would
04:54become clearer in the next two decades, the sense of success and momentum contributed to a conviction
05:01among communists that the world was going our way. Let's look first at Cuba as the prime example.
05:10Lying 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Cuba was the largest and wealthiest of the Caribbean islands
05:16with a giant sugar industry. After Cubans rebelled against the Spanish Empire,
05:22the United States intervened in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Afterwards, Cuba came under American
05:30economic domination, with some 60 percent of the agricultural land owned by Americans and their
05:36companies. A dictatorship under Colonel Fulgencio Batista ruled the island from 1952. In the 1950s,
05:45according to The Economist magazine, Cuba was among the five most developed countries in Latin America,
05:51life expectancy was close to that in the U.S. But Batista's dictatorship quickly became notorious for
05:59corrupt government. Broad opposition in Cuban society grew against the Batista regime. Up in the
06:06mountains, a guerrilla movement had been organized by Fidel Castro. Then, on January 1st, 1959, the dictator
06:15Batista fled the country and Castro's forces entered Havana, inaugurating a new state. Who was Castro,
06:23that tall, imposing figure who now appeared in military uniform, a bushy beard, and smoking a cigar?
06:32Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz had been born in Cuba in 1926, the son of a prosperous Spanish landowner.
06:40Castro was educated in Jesuit schools and trained as a lawyer while also becoming leader of the student
06:47movement and then a rebel. After fighting in the mountainous hinterland, now Castro and the men he
06:54had gathered around him paraded in Havana in triumph. Among his followers was Che Guevara,
07:01an Argentinian doctor. His real name was Ernesto, but Che was his nickname after a verbal habit of
07:08Argentines said to use Che as a filler word like eh. Che had been a committed communist since the 1950s
07:15and now was a close advisor to Castro. After arriving in Havana, Castro made himself head of the army
07:23and wielded state power as the maximum leader. Some 550 people from Batista's regime were put on
07:31show trial and executed, with Che Guevara playing a prominent role in this purge. In these months,
07:37many of those who had supported the broader opposition to Batista withdrew their support for
07:42Castro. Castro now allied himself with the popular Socialist Party of Cuba, the old Communist Party,
07:49and by October 1959 was in negotiations with the Soviet Union. Historians debate exactly when
07:57Castro became a communist. Some claim he was a nationalist who only turned to Marxism when
08:03alienated by the U.S., which opposed Castro's government from the start. Certainly, from an early
08:09stage, Castro's closest advisors were communists. His brother Raul was a member of the communist youth,
08:16and Che Guevara's radical experiences in Guatemala and communist loyalty long predated coming to power.
08:24At this early juncture, many Cubans hoped that the new Cuba would ensure rights and democracy.
08:31Castro had promised to restore the 1940 democratic constitution that Batista had overthrown.
08:38Instead, Castro was turning Cuba into a dictatorship with a difference. It became the first communist
08:44government in the American hemisphere and has remained so to this day over 60 years later.
08:50In quick succession, the new regime passed some 1,500 new decrees and laws to reorder society and the
08:59economy. Property was nationalized. The seizure of American property in Cuba antagonized the U.S.
09:06One year later, in 1962, the U.S. imposed a trade embargo. Meanwhile, American Presidents Eisenhower and
09:16Kennedy had already authorized plans for an invasion by Cuban exiles in the hope that that incursion would
09:23spark a nationwide revolt overthrowing Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, aiming to land in
09:32the Bay of the Bay of Pigs. The result of the Bay of Pigs. The result was a resounding failure. Over a thousand
09:37exiles were captured and no revolt materialized. The international situation heated up and Castro's fame spread
09:45globally. Just before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro described his revolution as socialist and then afterwards, in
09:55December 1961, avowed himself to be a Marxist-Leninist. This won him greater support from Khrushchev's Soviet
10:04Union and promises of military backing. The KGB's code name for Cuba was Bridgehead. So close was it to the main
10:13adversary, the United States. Cuba also cultivated ties with other communist countries, as when in 1960,
10:21Che traveled to North Korea. Tension reached a new high point with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
10:31Rashly, Khrushchev wanted to press an aggressive global plan to tip the balance of world forces.
10:38To put pressure on the Americans, he and Castro agreed to place missile silos on the island,
10:4490 miles from the U.S. Castro avowed that his concern was not with the defense of his island,
10:51but the higher ideological aim of advancing socialist internationalism.
10:57When these missile sites were detected by American spy planes, the October 1962 crisis unfolded.
11:04A tense nuclear confrontation, considered the most dangerous moment of the Cold War.
11:10The U.S. imposed a naval blockade. In an apocalyptic or romantic mood, Castro fiercely urged the Soviets
11:19to respond to any American invasion by launching the missiles. After such bellicosity, Castro was enraged
11:27when Khrushchev scaled back the crisis by withdrawing the missiles, without consulting his Cuban partner.
11:34In return, the Kennedy administration promised Khrushchev it would not invade Cuba, and also secretly removed
11:42American nuclear missiles from Turkey as a hidden part of the overall bargain.
11:48A few years later, Khrushchev was toppled by a Kremlin insider coup in 1964, in part in reaction to his
11:57brinksmanship in the Cuban missile crisis. Unlike in the era of Stalin, this internal purge did not
12:05end in Khrushchev's murder. Instead, he spent his remaining years in retirement, writing explosive memoirs.
12:14In Cuba, the new regime continued its development, even as thousands fled. Cuba was one in a
12:21succession of communist countries which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would not have categorized as
12:27ready for revolution. Indeed, the same had been true of Lenin's Russia. It did not match the profile
12:34of a land ready for revolution in the categories of Marx and Engels. Now, rather than being already
12:41industrialized with a radicalized proletariat, Cuba instead hailed its transformation as a peasant
12:49revolution, preparing for eventual rapid modernization. In practice, Cuba came to rely on massive Soviet
12:57subsidies, reaching $2 billion a year. At home, the regime placed heavy emphasis on socialized medicine
13:05for public health and educational reforms to encourage a radical increase in literacy.
13:12To achieve modernization, society was also to be regimented and steered.
13:17Youngsters were recruited into the Young Pioneers movement, modeled on that of the Soviet Union.
13:24Young Pioneers units marched through Havana, chanting, Cuba, see, Yankees, no.
13:32In urban areas and countryside alike, committees for the defense of the revolution were established from
13:381960 as institutions to regulate the population, a link from the local level up to the central authority.
13:46They were to coordinate social services, fire up revolutionary ardor, and be vigilant.
13:54Estimates are that some 84% of people over the age of 14 were enrolled in these.
14:01The Cuban exile Carlos Ere's memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, recalls a local branch of these
14:09committees that was near his family home. Ere wrote,
14:13Every block in Havana has one of these houses. They're everywhere. Watching, listening, prodding,
14:21intruding, threatening. We're unlucky enough to have them next door and to live in a climate that
14:28forces us to keep the windows open all the time. Repression came in many forms. Political prisoners were
14:36detained. Critics of the regime were subjected to public acts of repudiation and intimidation.
14:43Some dissenters were beaten. The regime showed a special hostility towards homosexuals.
14:49Those seeking escape sometimes took to rickety rafts to venture for the mainland. These raft
14:56people were called balceros. At the same time, a romantic aura was cultivated around revolutionary Cuba
15:04and spread worldwide. As had been the case in the early days of Soviet Russia, revolutionary tourists from
15:12Western countries flocked to Cuba to see the land they dreamt about, including the French existentialist,
15:19philosopher, and veteran political pilgrim, Jean-Paul Sartre. From 1969, American students joined the
15:27Venceremos brigade to travel every year to help with harvests in the sugarcane fields.
15:33Venceremos means we will win. Countless imitators of Castro's beard sported their hirsute splendor.
15:42In Western countries, what was termed the New Left sought fresh generational inspiration,
15:48not in the more staid older generation of the Soviet Union's leaders, but in the Third World and celebrated Cuba.
15:57In a brilliant 2015 article in the American Historical Review, the historian Ann Gorsuch describes a
16:06distinctive Soviet romance of revolutionary Cuba. Amid a more staid, aging regime in the Soviet Union,
16:15visions of Cuba sparked a revival of revolutionary romanticism. Through enthusiasm, Soviet citizens could
16:24vicariously share in the exotic drama of Cuba. Castro was a hero in the Soviet Union, which he visited for
16:32a grand tour in 1963, through a dozen cities over 40 days. Thousands of Cuban students came to study in the
16:42Soviet Union. Some married Soviets and took them home. In the other direction, several hundred Soviet citizens of
16:51Spanish origins, originally exiles from the Spanish Civil War, were sent to Cuba to advise and train there
16:59in their native Spanish. A Soviet-Cuban friendship society was founded in 1964, with none other than
17:07cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the president. Geopolitically, however, the standoff with the huge North American
17:16neighbor continued continued, as did the embargo. The CIA's Operation Mangus proposed sabotage and
17:23fomenting unrest in Cuba. A whole cascade of other wild plans called for the assassination of Castro.
17:32Meanwhile, every single agent that the CIA recruited in Cuba from 1961 had actually been turned and
17:41manipulated by the Cuban Direction General de Intelligencia. All the information being fed to the CIA by the 38
17:50agents it thought it was running was in fact disinformation. Thus, the CIA in effect paid the
17:59Cuban intelligence for the privilege of being duped. Cuban intelligence officers and police traveled to the
18:06Soviet Union to train. Even amid lavish Soviet benefaction, however, Cuban revolutionaries chafed at
18:14being patronized by their mentors and always urged more romantic revolutionary adventurism. In March 1965,
18:24Castro declared, we're no one's satellite and never will be. A micro-faction of pro-Moscow activists within the
18:33regime was purged. Fired by the same resentful determination to make his own mark as a revolutionary,
18:41in 1965, Che resigned his duties and took off for Africa. He trekked to Congo to support rebels fighting
18:50there against Mobutu Sese Seiko, but only remained there for seven months, judging the rebels to be losers.
18:57In 1966, back in South America, he slipped into Bolivia to organize revolution in the countryside.
19:06The U.S. sent a small special forces team which trained a Bolivian unit which then in 1967 captured
19:13and executed Che. Even more than in life, after his death, Che became an idol, the icon of a romantic rebel
19:22rather than a violent revolutionary. His image was spray-painted on walls, featured on posters in
19:29student dormitories, and countless t-shirts. A key moment came in 1968 when the Soviet Union
19:38underlanded Brezhnev invaded a fraternal state, Czechoslovakia, with other Warsaw Pact allies to end
19:46the Prague Spring and its liberalizing experiment of socialism with a human face. Worldwide condemnation
19:55followed, and many on the new left condemned the Soviet intervention. Unexpectedly, their idol,
20:03Fidel Castro, declared that the Soviet invasion, in fact, was justified as part of the people's
20:10struggle against imperialism. Castro announced, quote, in short, the Czechoslovak regime was
20:17moving toward capitalism, and it was inexorably marching toward imperialism. From our viewpoint,
20:24it is not permissible, and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another, end quote.
20:32Brezhnev and his fellow Soviet leaders were surprised, very pleased by Castro's loyalty,
20:38and rewarded it with an economic bailout. Shortly, Cuba owed the Soviet patrons billions.
20:46The Soviets also cultivated and encouraged other local revolutionary movements in Latin America.
20:53They supported the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, which they hoped might grow into a
20:58second bridgehead in the Americas, like Cuba. They also sent economic aid to Chile's new president
21:04president from 1970, Salvador Allende. The Soviets joked that there they were helping create a fraternal
21:12movement of socialism with red wine. Throughout the Third World, the Soviets sought to link up with
21:20national liberation movements. Over time, following the Soviet example, it was expected these new nations
21:28would turn onto the highway of progress and historical advance which the USSR had blazed. Vast aid flowed in
21:37the form of advisors, loans, technical advice, training for students in Soviet universities, shipping of
21:45industrial plants, and weapons and military advisors. The Soviets supported Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt,
21:54the leader Kwame Nkrumah in newly independent Ghana, and Sukarno in Indonesia.
22:02As ever, the Soviets were also seriously concerned that if they did not offer assistance, radicals might
22:09look towards China, the great rival. We observe here a grand irony. Internationalism could become a form of
22:17nationalism and chauvinism to win the prize status of being the vanguard of the international revolutionary
22:24movement. So let's turn to explore more that emerging rivalry between the Soviet Union and
22:32communist China under Mao. Especially in the 1960s, China was also bidding to be the leader of the Third
22:39World. It was in November 1957, at the Conference of Communists and Workers' Parties in Moscow, that Mao
22:47triumphantly declared that this was, quote, a time of a new turning point. Two winds are blowing now, the east wind
22:56and the west wind, end quote. Now, on its face, this was a confident avowal by Mao of the future being communist and
23:05belonging to the east wind. But hidden inside this statement was an assertion of China's new supremacy,
23:12its leadership of the worldwide communist movement. Mao's hour-long speech was a challenge to his Soviet
23:20hosts. He ended it with musings about nuclear war and said that he was not afraid, quote,
23:27If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism
23:34would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist, end quote.
23:40Mikoyan, that admirer of Cuba, was so horrified on hearing this speech that he just stood up and
23:47stared at Mao. But Mao considered his speech a great success.
23:52With Stalin dead in 1953, Mao saw himself as the senior leader. The Chinese Maoist model of peasant
24:03revolution would spread to the third world. China would be the new patron, not the Soviet Union.
24:11As the historian Shen Jian has pointed out with great insight, history's irony was subtly demonstrated.
24:18As he says, quote,
24:20Lying there in plain sight were the structural tensions between the legitimacy narratives that the Chinese
24:27communists had constructed, and the logic and rationality, primarily informed by Western experience,
24:35underlying the Moscow-dominated international communist movement, end quote.
24:40So from such latent structural tensions, there grew cracks, fissures, and eventually a full and ferocious
24:50split in what was supposed to be a brotherly, comradly, inter-nationalist revolutionary movement.
24:57By 1961, the Sino-Soviet split was evident, and mutual denunciations flew back and forth. Soviet
25:05advisors had been withdrawn from China in 1960, and then relations worsened still further.
25:13Mao labeled the Soviets revisionists. That is, they had abandoned the original principles of Marxism.
25:20The Soviets, meanwhile, warned that China was irresponsibly adventurous and volatile. When China exploded its
25:29first atomic bomb in 1964, the balance of forces evolved further, emboldening China.
25:37Paradoxically, when Mao provoked intensely internal convulsions within China,
25:44they actually were motivated by this claim of world leadership in the movement. This was especially true
25:50in the failed Great Leap Forward and its attendant famine of 1958 to 1961, and the Cultural Revolution,
25:59launched in 1966. I have discussed these epic events in much more detail in my course,
26:07Communism and Power from Stalin to Mao, so here I'll just briefly sketch them.
26:12When the Great Leap Forward was launched to transform China's economy with grassroots industrialization,
26:21massive collectivization of farming, and feats of will to overcome nature, the stated intent of the
26:28program was to outpace the British economy, but the implicit real goal was to race ahead of the former
26:36sponsor, the Soviet Union. Mass mobilization and determination instead produced an agricultural
26:44disaster, with millions starving to death. Mao's prestige was hurt, but after a tactical retreat,
26:52he reasserted himself by launching the Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966. Internally, young radical
27:00Red Guards were urged to denounce and purge officials and teachers in struggle sessions to eliminate foreign
27:09influences and to shake up the complacent establishment. Presiding over this turmoil, Mao declared,
27:17there is great chaos under heaven, the situation is excellent. Part of this program was to vindicate
27:26China's new global prominence as a promoter of continuous revolution. China would show the way for the
27:34Third World with its distinctive model of peasant revolt. Mao argued that China had a special role to play
27:43in what he called the Intermediate Zone between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the countries of Asia, Latin America,
27:52China, and Africa. Just as the Chinese comrades had triumphed in their own countryside, leading up to
28:00victory in 1949, that Third World realm was now essentially the world's countryside. Unleashing internal
28:10turmoil in the Cultural Revolution was meant to restore dynamism to China, at the same time as China was
28:17offering support and aid to foreign revolutionaries. China supported the North Vietnamese. They aided Sukarno
28:26in Indonesia, and sought to bring influence to bear across Africa. In Europe, the small communist state of
28:34Albania, under Enver Hoca, became a lonely little ally of the Chinese, and as a result, reaped massive aid.
28:43China wanted to make clear that it was not a weak recipient of foreign aid, as it had been during the Second
28:51World War, but that it was now a great rising power that dispensed aid and advice to others who wanted to follow
29:00its example. Thus, even as the famine caused by the great leap forward was raging in China, it still sent funds and food
29:09abroad abroad and even increased it. By 1971, China was spending over 5% of its national budget on foreign aid.
29:20Railroads were offered to African countries. Visiting students were hosted in China. Mali was even sent 4
29:28million copies of Mao's Little Red Book. That's an individual copy for each inhabitant of the country.
29:35And here's a final telling detail. When Chinese medical teams of traveling doctors were sent to African
29:42countries to offer medical care in clinics, which were carefully decorated with Mao posters,
29:50these Chinese physicians learned in each local language this sentence to tell their patients,
29:56Chairman Mao sent me here. While engaged in this dramatic outreach, however, China's Communist Party
30:06simultaneously cut off relations with other communists abroad who were judged to be revisionists,
30:14deviating from the correct political program. So the quest for a pure and correct form of
30:20internationalism under Mao's leadership, paradoxically actually led China into self-imposed isolation,
30:29and all this while China claimed to speak for the third world. In her brilliant study,
30:36entitled Maoism, A Global History, Julia Lovell concludes, quote,
30:42This was always a parochial flavor of internationalism, driven by a narcissistic interest in how the
30:50world prized China, rather than by a disinterested solidarity. China styled itself as the patriarch of the
30:59global revolutionary family. The CCP acquired a habit of speaking for the world, and especially for the
31:08developing world, end quote. Going beyond even this, Mao once simply declared to foreign visitors,
31:17we are the third world. Unsurprisingly, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated still further. By 1969, Soviet and
31:28Chinese troops were actually clashing at the Amur River at China's northern border in an undeclared,
31:35hidden war. Cautious Soviet diplomats asked their Western counterparts what their reaction might be
31:42to a Soviet preemptive strike against China. By 1970, the Chinese leadership was in the grip of a war scare.
31:51What would happen if open, full-scale war broke out between the two communist powers?
31:57Even after the tensions left, the nightmarish prospect was haunting. In the Soviet Union,
32:05a dark joke circulated about what the future might hold. This joke imagined the world in the year 2050,
32:13and it went like this. In 2050, the whole world is at peace, except for some isolated border clashes
32:21on the Finnish-Chinese border. The implication was that the Soviet Union was gone. So decades before
32:28the Soviet Union actually collapsed, jokesters were already thinking the unthinkable, which is of course
32:35what jokesters do best. As these growing tensions suggest, even set against a backdrop of great optimism and
32:43confidence, the promise of expanding communist influence worldwide so considerable in the 1950s
32:50and 1960s began to give way to a growing set of challenges, problems, and frictions in the 1970s and
32:591980s. We'll closely examine that trajectory next.
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