Soviet-Cuban relations

Under Stalin

In the first post-war years, bilateral relations developed positively - some emigrants from Russia accepted Soviet citizenship, the Cuba and USSR magazine was published in Spanish, and the Cuban-Soviet Institute for Cultural Exchange operated. However, with the onset of the Cold War, relations between the two countries worsened - on May 28, 1949, 11 Soviet citizens were arrested, who were members of the USSR-Ukrainian Ukrainian-Belarusian committee, and 11 other Cubans with them. In 1952, through the coup d'etat, Fulgencio Batista came to power in Cuba . Stalin in response the same year broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba. In 1959 , a revolution occurred in Cuba, after which Fidel Castro came to power, and in 1960 diplomatic relations were restored.

Under Khrushchev

The attitude of the Soviet leadership towards the new Cuban government remained undefined until the United States tried to forcefully overthrow Castro in April 1961 during the failed operation in the Cochinos Gulf . In May 1961, Fidel openly proclaimed that Cuba would follow the socialist path of development. This dramatically changed the Kremlin’s attitude towards Cuba. Soviet engineers, military specialists and weapons immediately went to Liberty Island to prevent a recurrence of American intervention.

In 1962 , Raul Castro paid a visit to the USSR, where he met with Nikita Khrushchev . They agreed that in order to surely protect Cuba from American aggression, Soviet medium-range missiles should be deployed on the island. On October 14, 1962, Americans discovered the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, the Caribbean crisis erupted. In exchange for dismantling similar American missiles in Turkey and guaranteeing non-aggression against Cuba, Khrushchev agreed to return the missiles to the Soviet Union.

After this incident, the previous enthusiasm in relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union disappeared, since the decision to withdraw missiles from Cuba was made by Khrushchev alone without any consultation with Castro. In 1980, the Soviet leadership told Raul Castro that the USSR no longer intended to defend Cuba.

Under Brezhnev

Before its collapse, the USSR, however, actively helped Cuba. Thousands of Soviet specialists in all industries worked on the island. Particular progress was made in the field of medicine , Cuban doctors are still considered one of the most qualified in the world. For generous assistance to the Soviet Union, Cuba paid, as a rule, with sugar , the main export item.

Under Gorbachev

In 1988, the visit of M.S. Gorbachev was planned, which was postponed to April 1989 due to the earthquake in Armenia . In 1989, the USSR began to have problems in the economy, so one of the results of the visit was a serious reduction in aid to the Republic of Cuba, and the issue of Cuban debt to the Soviet Union was also raised. Subsequently, the debt of the Republic of Cuba to the Soviet Union, which passed to Russia as the successor of the USSR, was written off by the Russian government in 2014. During the visit of Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Cuba in April 1989, at a press conference held near Havana on the territory of Expo Cuba, a Canadian correspondent asked about the presence of the USSR Armed Forces in Cuba, to which the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee replied: “There are no Soviet troops in Cuba! There are only Soviet military specialist officers who train Cuban soldiers. ”Until 1993, the Group of Soviet Military Specialists in Cuba (GSVSK) was in the form of a motorized rifle brigade, as well as electronic reconnaissance and communications units. Personnel were supplied and rotated every six months, under the guise of agricultural specialists, using USSR passenger liners (Ivan Franko, Dmitry Shostakovich, Adzharia, Leonid Sobinov, Taras Shevchenko and others). The phased withdrawal of this group began in late 1991.

After the collapse of the USSR, economic assistance to Cuba was completely curtailed by the authorities of the new Russia, and a humanitarian catastrophe began on the island .

In the 1980s The Soviet Union, among other raw materials, supplied oil to Cuba. Instead of transporting oil from the USSR, Cuba’s state-owned trading company Cuba Metales agreed with the Swiss trading company Marc Rich + Co ^{[approx. 1]} on the supply of an appropriate amount of oil from Venezuela , while oil from the USSR was provided by Marc Rich + Co at lower than market prices for subsequent sale on the world market; the profit was divided between the trader and the government of Cuba ^[2] .

• Russian-Cuban relations
• Foreign policy of the USSR
• Caribbean crisis
• Operation Anadyr
• Group of Soviet Military Specialists in Cuba
• Sino-Cuban relations
• Visit L.I. Brezhnev to Cuba (1974)

Notes

1. ↑ The head of the company was the infamous American trader Mark Rich .

Footnotes

• Daniel Ammann The oil king. The Secret Life of Mark Rich = Daniel Ammann. The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich .. - M .: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2018 .-- 236 p. - ISBN 978-5-9614-6391-0 .