In January 1974, the main hierarch of the Soviet Union landed on Cuba. “Welcome (Leonid) Brezhnev, this is your house”read a decal that was pasted on many Havana doors. Fidel Castroendowed with his rifle with a telescopic sight, accompanied in the image the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. They looked together and triumphant. A way of celebrating political and commercial relations that were in their splendor. The alliance was believed to be eternal, but it fell apart in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR. Almost half a century after that visit, Havana and Moscow are once again intertwined.
On the one hand, the island is going through a crisis of enormous proportions. Vladimir Putinmeanwhile, find in Cuba a regional ally in the midst of their invasion of Ukraine. As part of this new honeymoon, Cubans will once again learn Russian. The University of Havana prepares classes that will be broadcast on the Educational Channel of television starting in November.
The return of the language of Fyodor Dostoevsky to educational structures was confirmed by Vladimir Shkunov, member of the Expert Council of the Government of Russia. That return has only a symbolic cultural value when compared to the times of Castro and Brezhnev’s decal, when the largest of the Antilles had “slavicized”and thousands of Cubans went to study at Moscow universities.
new agreements
Despite being a limited language course, it acquires a special significance because it matches a greening of the bilateral alliance over one completely different basis to the one of the Cold War: Russia is not communist and post-Castroism only maintains frayed shreds of the ideology that constituted it. The panorama is so different in relation to what could happen almost four decades ago that the head of the Cuban-Russian Business Committee, Boris Titovrecently came to consider that “Cuba is today the Soviet Union of the late 80s”, when part of the bureaucracy laid the foundations for its conversion to the most ferocious capitalism.
The Government of Miguel Díaz-Canel is going through enormous difficulties: inflation and growing poverty, fuel shortages and blackouts, factors that only increase citizen discontent that had its great and unprecedented social boil two years ago. Díaz-Canel, re-elected three months ago, met Putin in Moscow last November, quite a gesture by the Cuban head of state of veiled endorsement of the Kremlin’s policy towards Ukraine. “Both Russia and Cuba are subject to sanctions that come from and have their origin in the same enemy,” he said on that occasion. The island owes its ally some $2.3 billion. Putin, meanwhile, responded that first the USSR and then Russia “have always supported and continue to support the Cuban people in their struggle for independence.”
After that meeting, the trade agreements were invigorated, ranging from the mining and the agriculture, which includes the rehabilitation of an obsolete sugar mill in the province of Sancti Spíritus. Besides, Moscow it is proposed to deliver some 30,000 barrels of oil newspapers to revive an ailing economy.
the return of the past
This is the background of the return of the Russian language, for the moment, through the screens. Despite the limited dose of it, she did nothing but rekindle memories of a controversial past. The break with the United States also meant in the 1960s a profound cultural turn. From being a place where American cinema, fashion and music were consumed almost synchronously, it passed to a new universe marked by Soviet films and the Marxism-Leninism manuals of the Soviet academies. For Wendy Guerra, author of ‘Todos se van’ and ‘Domingo en Revolución’, currently in exile, her memory took her back to the days when Disney cartoons were replaced by Cheburashka, Masha and the Bear or Uncle Stiopa.
“Those of us born in the 1970s recite ‘Nu, pogodi! (You’ll pay me back!) by heart.” Guerra refers to the animation directed by Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin, which Cuban children knew by heart. “Our childhood imaginary is based on learning about Soviet adventures and their extrapolation to the tropics. In our affective codes we treasure the voices and music of the popularly called Russian dolls, used today as an iconic, burlesque or nostalgic spring.”
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Already at the dawn of the 90s, when relationships were flaking, the troubadour Carlos Varela he sang that he had not grown up with ‘Superman’ and that his television was of Soviet origin. At that time, the young plastic artist José Toirac ironically painted the photographs of ‘Granma’, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party, in the key of socialist realism. A preview of the collapse.
The mockery of the past acquires another meaning in the present that is accompanied not only by educational innovations and the free circulation of the ruble on the island. “Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) has an invitation (to Cuba), but I don’t know how his plans will line up,” said the Russian ambassador in HavanaViktor Koronellim.