“We live in two different worlds: you in the heart of Europe; we in the Caribbean Sea, on the other side of the Atlantic, very close to the shores of the United States. For you in Europe, security constitutes an objective and an important step toward consolidating peace… Our people, on the other hand, have little notion of the concept of security. We are not protected by any military alliance. We have grown accustomed to living without the slightest idea of security, except what we can provide ourselves.”
This is how Fidel Castro spoke to the leaders of the Polish Communist Party in June 1972.
Traveling through the Warsaw Pact countries, Eastern Europe, and the USSR, he had reminded everyone that the U.S. war against Vietnam was the commitment of the time. “Geographic and historical circumstances determine the diverse ways in which we apply the concepts of Marxism-Leninism to the struggle,” he emphasized to the Poles.
This wasn’t exactly a philosophical formulation, but a geopolitical one. It was the same reason why neither Cuba nor Vietnam were “inviolable territory of the socialist camp.” So, to speak of internationalism and national liberation as requirements of a socialist policy in Prague, Budapest, or Bucharest was to remind them that that bloc was a naked king; since the problems of that World II were far from sharing the agendas of the Third World; and that, despite being in the East, their conditioned reflexes and priorities were more North than South.
Although Cuba’s economy was tied to the socialist camp, and in fact it was joining the CMEA, Cuban diplomacy was not guided by rules or codes that ignored our fundamental differences.
That had already been his position a few years earlier, when the Pact troops intervened in Czechoslovakia (1968). At that time, the Cuban government had recognized as legitimate the “bitter reason,” based on the line drawn between Eastern and Western Europe, which had granted the USSR the prerogative to preserve “the integrity of the socialist bloc.” However, that intervention lacked any legality in terms of international law, as Fidel Castro himself had stated.
The Cuban approach to the intervention in Czechoslovakia differentiated between legal and geopolitical reasons; and recognized that neither implied ideological consistency. If this had existed, he also argued, the Pact troops would have been fighting in Vietnam then, for the cause of unification and against the U.S. invasion, as well as ready to defend Cuba if necessary.
Although that was the literal content of that same speech, some observers said (and still say) that Cuba had folded “to Moscow’s line.” According to Juan Sánchez Monroy, then head of the USSR section of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this discourse had caused such a stir there that the USSR ambassador in Havana submitted a note of protest to the Cuban Foreign Ministry. If relations relaxed later, the reason was not precisely his appreciation for that Cuban position.
Although these and other observers have continued to affirm that the ideological signs of “Sovietization” began in the late 1960s, the speeches during his tour of Eastern Europe and Africa in 1972 tell a different story.
Confusing the global diplomatic activism that accompanied Cuban policy from its origins with a youthful ideological impulse, or an exercise reserved for the foreign policy sector, avoids its strategic scope. It was aimed at breaking the isolation imposed by the United States, defending ourselves against its policies of siege, and counter acting a geopolitical environment that could not have been more adverse, although forging these alliances with large and small countries required a willingness to act across the Atlantic.
Indeed, the alliances between the multifaceted ideologies of the Tricontinental and Non-Aligned Movements around Havana were, above all, a factory of political alliances, encompassing the leftist social and political movements in the First World. Although Washington and its partners viewed them as “an international of armed terrorists,” their objective was not so much to “export the revolution” but to build, based on common interests, a space for consensus beyond the institutions of an international system dominated by the strongest.
A closer look reveals that the main problem of Cuban politics within that broad Tricontinental and Non-Aligned Movement was not the imperialist challenge, but the clientelist policies of the USSR, and especially China, which fostered division.
More than a decade later, upon assuming the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1979, Cuba harshly condemned the People’s Republic of China, not only for invading Vietnam, but also as “the ruling clique that supported Pinochet against Allende; South Africa’s aggression against Angola; the Shah of Iran; Somoza; that supports and supplies arms to Sadat; that justifies the Yankee blockade against Cuba and the permanence of the Guantánamo Naval Base; that defends NATO; that joins the United States and the most reactionary forces in Europe and around the world.”
In the case of the USSR, its invasion of Afghanistan that same year would not exactly make Cuba happy. The Soviet intervention posed a public diplomacy dilemma: defending the principle of sovereignty and independence, while avoiding at the same time “fueling reaction and imperialism” (Roa dixit); and facing the costs associated with the rejection by many NAM governments of a USSR that Fidel had described as its “natural ally.”
If the Soviet invasion complicated Cuban policies within the NAM, its disagreement continued to be expressed through diplomatic channels to Moscow. According to an expert who followed Middle East policy at the time, “While Fidel Castro publicly supported Moscow, he was highly critical of its invasion, which he bitterly discussed with Soviet officials.” (Amuchástegui, 1999).
From the outcome of the Missile Crisis and relations with liberation movements on three continents, through concepts of peaceful coexistence and detente in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Central American wars and Afghanistan in the 1980s, the differences between Cuba and the Soviet bloc, not to mention China, were almost always very visible.
But not everything was about differences regarding the Third World. The African geopolitical space, where the USSR and even the United States had fewer assets than Europe, gave Cuba an opportunity for exceptional balance, both in terms of soft power and military capability.
It was Cuba’s relations in Africa, from the deployment of its forces in Algeria (1963) and the Congo (1965), its collaboration with the liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, as well as the close political-diplomatic and cooperative relations with the colonies that had gained independence from Great Britain and France, that laid the foundations for larger-scale strategic actions. The conflicts in southwestern Angola and the Horn of Africa fostered greater alignment between Cuban and USSR policies on the continent; they also exacerbated the island’s differences with China.
In this very brief review of Cuban geopolitics and its interaction with the socialist powers during the Cold War, the final phase of the USSR’s perestroika cannot be overlooked.
Some recollections of Gorbachev’s visit to Havana in 1989 have highlighted above all Fidel’s references to the differences between the policies of perestroika and rectification. However, as the account of these relations outlined here demonstrates, it was not Cuban or Soviet domestic policies that sparked bilateral relations over three decades, but rather international ones, and the geopolitical factors that fueled them.
Strictly speaking, these differences were neither recent nor worsened under the last Soviet president, whose policies toward other socialist countries were the least hegemonic of all. Fidel Castro would explicitly recognize him as “the standard-bearer of those principles.” And in doing so, he would return to relations within the socialist camp and revolutionary movements around the world, with a discourse as direct as his 1972 tour:
We all remember the problems the revolutionary and socialist movements had when they tried to analyze and judge what a socialist country did within its borders. This brought many problems, and serious problems. Today, every socialist country tries to perfect socialism based on its interpretations of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.
Linking with Cuba’s position on the burning issue of sovereignty and geopolitics, he then added:
If a socialist country wants to build capitalism, we must respect its right to build capitalism; we cannot interfere with it.… So the principle of unrestricted respect for the sovereign will of each people and each country is a golden rule of the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
It is worth remembering, by the way, that this visit and this speech preceded by seven months the storming of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialism in its Soviet bloc form.
Obviously, learning from these strategic lessons, in the current complex geopolitical circumstances, is not exactly an intellectual luxury. They all shed light on very complicated moments, when realistic and far-reaching policies were adopted, and alliances and forms of cooperation were forged with actors of all sizes. Some relied on military resources, but not the majority. They were built on principles, not narrow ideological visions, and based on strategic visions, not short-term “pragmatic” goals.
Such lessons are key, above all, to reinforcing a broader political vision of the present and the uncertain future, where some Cold War questions are resurfacing. Among them, let’s say, how geopolitical reconfigurations affect the so-called regional spheres of influence of the major powers, new and old.
To avoid playing them by ear, amidst this confusing swell of a post-Cold War that seems to be coming to an end, we must think them through. And without losing our bearings.
