Fifty Years of Revolution: Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World

4. Havana and Moscow: The Washington Factor

4 Havana and Moscow The Washington Factor Mervyn J. Bain During the cold war Cuba was able to break traditional international relations thinking and obtain a disproportionately large amount of power in geopolitics for a small Caribbean island. The character of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro was important in explaining this phenomenon, but Havana’s relationship with Moscow was also key. At first Cuba and the Soviet Union had appeared very strange bedfellows, not least due to the absence of a shared history and their geographical distance, but the relationship became so all-encompassing that in the 1970s Cuba faced accusations that its soldiers stationed in Africa were merely the “Gurkhas of the Soviet empire.”1 A large variety of pressures explain why the relationship originally blossomed , with many pressures continuing to be highly significant throughout the relationship’s thirty-year duration. Cuban-Soviet relations came to an abrupt end with the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991, but remarkably some of these pressures survived to retain significance in the relationship that subsequently evolved between Cuba and Russia in the post-Soviet world. As the 1990s progressed new pressures developed while others that had disappeared reemerged to also influence the “new” relationship. However, one pressure that has remained constant throughout the revolutionary period is the desire of the U.S. government to witness the demise of the Castro regime, with the specific nature of Washington’s Cuba policy since 1959 being the principal focus of this book. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. policy may have taken the form of covertly trying to overthrow Castro, but the economic embargo against the island is now more than forty-five years old, and although international relations are vastly different in the twenty-first century than during the Havana and Moscow: The Washington Factor · 73 cold war period, Washington’s wish to see the revolutionary government in Havana consigned to history has not diminished. This remains true despite Barack Obama’s pledges to pursue a policy of possible engagement with the Cuban government. The result is that the United States has had a fundamental role in relations between Havana and Moscow throughout their duration. This chapter will analyze all the various pressures that have impinged on relations between Havana and Moscow since the late 1950s, with particular attention being focused on the role of Washington in this relationship that transcended both the end of the cold war and the appearance of a new world order. Cuban-Soviet Relations The role that the United States played, both politically and economically, in Cuba throughout the first half of the twentieth century was of vital importance to the creation of relations between Havana and Moscow in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Uncertainty may have existed over the exact nature of the revolution that had taken place on the Caribbean island in 1959, but what was abundantly clear was that the new government in Havana most certainly wanted to change its relationship with Washington. Moreover, the strong prevalence of nationalism within the revolution, and the fact that Ernesto “Che” Guevara had witnessed the events in Guatemala in 1954 when U.S.-backed exiles had overthrown the progressive government of Jacob Arbenz, further reduced the chances of close relations between Cuba and the United States after 1959. In this regard Fidel Castro would later comment, “We would not in any event have ended up as close friends. The U.S. had dominated us for too long.”2 Moreover, Washington’s reaction to the Cuban Revolution only exacerbated the Cuban desire for change. Traditionally, Washington may have taken only sporadic interest in the island, but this quickly changed after January 1959, due to the government’s dislike of what it perceived as summary executions and also to fears over U.S. economic investments. At this time feelings of insecurity existed in the U.S. capital, as it appeared that Moscow was winning the cold war and it had been only ten years since China had been “lost” to communism. It was feared that the Cuban Revolution and changes in Soviet foreign policy, which will be detailed, could lead to possible communist penetration in Latin America. As a result the decision was made that events in Cuba could not be allowed to run their course and that the new government in Havana should be removed from 74 · Mervyn J. Bain power...