Until the early 1990s, Cuba had not only ideological support by the Soviet Union, but also financial.
El Político
It was his great ally for decades, but this came to an end on December 26, 1991, the date of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Before that date, specifically in 1989, Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban dictatorship, anticipated the possible disintegration of the USSR.
“If tomorrow or any day we wake up with the news that a great civil strife has been created in the USSR, or even wake up to the news that the USSR has disintegrated, which we hope will never happen, Even in those circumstances, Cuba and the Cuban Revolution would continue to fight and would continue to resist! ”he said on July 26, 1989.
But what was Cuba like at that time, protected by a great power? They even called it the tropical version of Moscow. The BBC carried out the following work that tells a little about what was raised:
The rumors had materialized: the same Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, announced with a mortuary tone that the Soviet Union, the great ally for decades of the government of Fidel Castro, had ceased to exist.
It was the end of December 1991 and the Caribbean island lived days of uncertainty.
The shelves of Cuban bookstores were crammed with Russian books, and translations of Sputnik, Pravda, and Moscow News filled the corner stalls.
The canned ones were called "Russian meat", men and women decked themselves in winter polyester clothes, wore a perfume called "Red Moscow" and took their children to school in red and blue scarves to recite the motto (which is still is used) of "pioneers for communism."
Has it resisted?
“Avant-garde workers” and outstanding students won as a prize a “stimulus trip” to Krakow or Leningrad or an “Aurika” washing machine, an “Orbita” fan or a “Zil” refrigerator.
Young people learned Russian as a foreign language (not English, which was the language of the "enemy") and children grew up watching cartoons that almost none understood: Cheburashka, the Bear Misha, Lolek and Bolek or the Hare and the Wolf (names that they will say little to those who grew up with Mickey Mouse or Sesame Street anywhere else in the world).
Lada or Moskvitch cars circulated through the streets of the island (which three decades later are still operating), the military used T-55 tanks and AKM rifles in their parades and the posters and billboards announced "the irrevocable and eternal friendship" between the people from "Cuba and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
But the source of it all was about to change. By then, like a domino effect, the old socialist republics had jumped on the unstoppable train of change and, by the end of 1991, Cuba was practically the last stronghold of the Cold War in the West.
"Another 30 years have passed, but the issue of what happened in the USSR and how it affected Cuba cannot have any more validity with what we are living here right now," historian Ariel Dacal, author of Russia, from real socialism to real capitalism.
Similar emergencies
"Today it is more necessary than ever to discuss that historical process that ended with perestroika, because to a large extent it has to do with similarities that right now there are in the Cuban structure itself with respect to what generated that process in the USSR" he says.
"Today the Cuban working class is facing emergencies similar to those experienced by the Soviet Union 30 years ago, in addition to a similar structural crisis: economic, political, paradigm crisis, everything," he adds.
