VIRUS OF REVOLUTION: NORTH-SOUTH RELATIONS AND THE ORIGINS OF CUBA'S GLOBAL ODYSSEY, 1959-1967

Abstract

This thesis argues that the origins of Cuba’s global odyssey stemmed from Havana’s desire to rewrite the rules of international conduct between the imperial powers of the global North and the subjugated states of the global South. As early as 1961, at the height of Havana’s vulnerability, Cuba began pouring aid—at its own expense and against its immediate self-interests—into revolutionary and anticolonial movements in Latin America and Africa simultaneously. Many of these movements were not communist, and Havana recognised that aiding them would not augment Cuba’s security.

Marshalling archival documents, published sources, speeches, and interviews to investigate Cuba’s motivations, this study engages with and contributes to a burgeoning corpus of works examining Cuba’s twentieth century foreign relations. It reinforces the prevailing consensus that Cuba was far from a Soviet puppet by demonstrating that communist ideology and Moscow’s priorities were of secondary importance to Havana. Cuba’s revolutionaries, comprising a coalition of communists and non-communists, acted to repel unilateral and aggressive hegemons, whether they were capitalist or socialist. This thesis, however, diverges from scholars who claim that Cuba only possessed limited aims in the 1960s because Cold War tensions circumscribed Havana’s ambitions. Instead, because Cuba’s revolution was rooted in a global anti-imperialist agenda, Cuba’s foreign policy acquired a global character as early as the revolution’s victory in 1959 independent of Cold War dynamics.

Since the East-West ideological and superpower rivalry meant little to Cuba, and given Havana’s global ambitions, this thesis posits that Cuban leaders were preoccupied with visions of a global North-South conflict. Consequently, Cuba embarked on its audacious extracontinental forays to unravel the final vestiges of global imperialism. The origins of Cuba’s twentieth century odyssey, though a crucial part of the Cold War experience, can only be explained by dislodging it from the Cold War narrative.