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Philip Chrimes, Our comrades in Havana: Cuba, the Soviet Union, & eastern Europe, 1959–1991, International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 6, November 2024, Pages 2706–2707, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae260
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In the literature, Cuba's relations with the European socialist world between 1959 and 1991 have been largely confined to the Russia–Cuba bilateral relationship. Limited access to Cuban and Soviet archives has constrained scholars attempting to elaborate on even this narrow relationship. Rarely have the individual voices of the eastern European states come into focus. Radoslav Yordanov joins the latest trend in Cold War studies in broadening the range of archival resources to include the recently declassified records from the various eastern European states. Yordanov's prodigious research reveals, for the first time, a much more complex and often adversarial relationship between the various actors. Yordanov even manages to unearth little known facets of the Soviet–Cuban relationship: a Czechoslovak embassy report details the important visit to Cuba that the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, made in 1981 (p. 185).
Yordanov adopts a largely chronological approach that follows the vicissitudes of the three-decades-long relationship, adeptly interweaving internal Cuban developments with Havana's notable foreign policy activism. He analyses in depth the ‘long and winding mutual courtship’, from the triumph of the revolution in 1959 until Cuba's formal entry into the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon or CMEA) in 1972 (p. 98). This was a turbulent period in the relationship, marked by much mutual reproach: Fidel Castro was profoundly offended by the manner in which the October 1962 missile crisis was resolved without his having been consulted, while Soviet-bloc diplomats were concerned with Cuba's ‘unorthodox methods of economic management’ in the 1960s (p. 86). Cuba's entry into the CMEA was the result of a long incremental process in which Havana came to terms with the economic mistakes of the 1960s, a point when the Soviet bloc viewed the island ‘as a more ideologically predictable, politically reliable, and economically viable partner’ (p. 96). As evidenced in the reports that Yordanov has unearthed, Cuba received special developing-country member status in the CMEA, of which Havana took advantage and which became a financial burden for the Soviet bloc. The author shows how Cuba and its eastern European allies began to diverge in the late 1970s and 1980s over Cuba's role in the Third World, with the Cubans expressing disappointment at the low level of support from the Soviet bloc. Yordanov's research specifically confirms Piero Gleijeses’ disputed assertion in Conflicting missions (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) that Cuba made a free and sovereign decision to intervene in Angola in November 1975 (p. 126). He also affirms that ‘Havana should not be seen as a mere Moscow proxy in the Horn’ of Africa in 1977–8 (p. 130). Yordanov endorses Cole Blasier's conclusion in The giant's rival (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987) that ‘the Cuban-Soviet relationship was a marriage not only of convenience but also of convergence’.
