Cuba and the Soviet Bloc: Searching for the Last Guardians of Socialism

Abstract

Based on a wide array of original documents from over 20 archives in Eastern Europe, the US, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, this paper traces the complex interplay between Havana’s revolutionary ideology and pragmatic state instincts which governed Cuba’a relations with the Soviet bloc from the ouster of Fulgencio Batista until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It overviews their relations by hearing the candid voices of Moscow’s closest East European allies (Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia) regarding Cuba’s continuous transformations. Additionally, the views of the other East European socialist states, which were not among Moscow’s closes backers, namely Albania, Yugoslavia and Romania, are also taken into account. In so doing, this paper seeks to enrich our understanding of the complex trajectory Cuba, the Soviet Union and the remaining East European socialist states underwent in their struggle against the common enemy, the United States. It also seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the interplay between the realist imperative of state survival and the ideological drive of revolutionary expansionism, which marked Havana’s relations with the East, the West and the South throughout the Cold War.