Antoni Kapcia is professor of Latin American history at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Research on Cuba. His works include Leadership in the Cuban Revolution: The Unseen Story, A Short History of Revolutionary Cuba: Revolution, Power, Authority and the State from 1959 to the Present Day and Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties.
Cold War stereotypes presented Cuba under Fidel Castro as a Soviet satellite in the Caribbean. But a closer look at Havana’s relations with the Eastern Bloc shows that its leaders were far more independent than such conventional wisdom would suggest.
When Joe Biden became US president, many Cubans hoped he would loosen some of the restrictions on trade and travel imposed by Donald Trump. But Biden has increased the pressure on Cuba, greatly worsening the island’s economic difficulties.
Sixty years ago, the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war before the superpowers reached an agreement. The missile crisis led Cuba’s leaders to distrust their Soviet ally — an attitude that ultimately helped their revolutionary system to outlast the USSR’s.
Cuba is facing a new set of challenges as a post-Castro leadership confronts the pandemic and its economic fallout. But Cuban socialism has repeatedly shown its capacity for survival and adaptation since the revolution of 1959.
Throughout his career, two misleading stereotypes distorted our view of Raúl Castro. He was neither a pale shadow of his brother, nor a one-dimensional pro-Soviet ideologue, but a major historical figure who played a key role in shaping the Cuban system and then reforming it.