How Cuba’s Communists Survived the Fall of the Soviet Union
The fall of the USSR in 1991 left Cuba mired in economic crisis and increasingly vulnerable to hostility from Washington. For the revolution to survive, it had to draw on its own domestic legitimacy — including its independence from the Soviet model.
Portrait of a Cuban man in his home in Matanzas in 1991. (Lily FRANEY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Before the July 11 protests, the last major display of public dissent in Cuba came in 1994, early in the “Special Period” of economic hardships following the collapse of the USSR. Since soon after the 1959 revolution, the Eastern Bloc countries had been important allies for Havana, but Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1980s reforms and then the USSR’s final crisis spelled trouble for Cuba at a time of defeats for the Left across Latin America. Yet the revolution survived — also proving that it had sunk deeper roots in society than Eastern Bloc governments.
Even Sandvik Underlid is author of Cuba Was Different: Views of the Cuban Communist Party on the Collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Socialism, a study based on extensive interviews with members of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) as well as a systematic examination of the party daily, Granma. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about how Cuban media presented events in Eastern Europe, PCC members’ sense of Cuban “national specificity,” and the changes in the country since the Special Period.
David Broder
During Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s reforms in the USSR, Cuba launched “Rectification.” What was this?
Even Sandvik Underlid
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