Cuba Was Always Much More Than a Soviet Satellite State

Review of Our Comrades in Havana: Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991 by Radoslav Yordanov (Stanford University Press, 2024)

From the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution, hardened Cuba-watchers have become wearily familiar with external interpretations of the phenomenon that are consistently underpinned by a wide range of somewhat lazy assumptions. For the most part, those assumptions were originally based on simplifications that the Cold War generated, but they still remain visible long after the geopolitical context has changed beyond recognition. Others simply relied on predetermined readings arising from European or North American theories.

Against that backdrop, Radoslav Yordanov’s Our Comrades in Havana is certainly a welcome contribution. It aims to correct some of the most persistent and unhelpful assumptions about Cuba’s relations with the old Soviet Union and the wider socialist bloc between 1959 and 1991, which depict Cuba as a “client-state” or “puppet” that was dependent on Soviet ideas and priorities.

Instead, Yordanov argues for a more nuanced approach, not least by focusing more than previous researchers on Cuba’s relationship with the bloc countries beyond the Soviet Union. His methodology has been to trawl painstakingly and rigorously through the diplomatic archives of those countries, along with a range of intelligence reports from the former bloc states as well as the US files. He then follows the trajectories of the various inter-state relationships in chronological order, providing us with new revelations and complexities.

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