Moscow’s relationship with Havana in the period from the time of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 is one that received considerable academic attention as events were unfolding. Since 1992, the bilateral relationship in this thirty-year period has received less focus, but books such as Yuri Pavlov’s Soviet–Cuban Alliance 1959–1991 have been published.Footnote ¹ Pavlov’s work provides important insights into Moscow–Havana relations due to his career as a Soviet diplomat who was involved in the bilateral relationship. However, Yordanov’s Our Comrades in Havana. Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991 utilizes archival sources that have become available since 1992. Authors such as Barry Carr, whose work focuses on pre-1959 relations between Moscow and the fledgling Cuban Communist Party, and Aleksandr Fursenk and Timothy J. Naftali’s One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (1997) have also used archival sources that have recently become available. Furthermore, in 2004, to mark a hundred years since the first diplomatic contact between Russia and Cuba, the Russian and Cuban Foreign Ministries published a series of documents on their bilateral relationship.Footnote ² Yordanov’s work adds and augments this previous literature by drawing on archival sources in Russia and, significantly, from former socialist bloc countries in Eastern Europe – specifically Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Serbia. Additionally, Yordanov also uses archival sources from Cuba, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The use of these Eastern European sources is significant in itself and, as the author rightly argues, enables the book to scrutinize an under-researched yet important topic: the relationship between Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe in the period when Havana’s ties with the socialist world were at their closest (1959–1991). Yordanov pursues this analysis across ten chronological chapters. These chapters cover the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba initial encounters in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution; the burgeoning relationship of the late 1950s and early 1960s; the tensions that emerged after the Cuban Missile Crisis; improvements in relations in the 1970s; and, finally, the strain placed on the relationship by the reforms instigated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid- to late 1980s, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991.

Yordanov articulates the significance of the emergence of the Cuban Revolution for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, highlighting its geostrategic importance, above all Cuba’s proximity to the United States. He also shows that Czechoslovakian envoys reported to Prague on the need to dispatch a large number of political, economic, and cultural experts to Havana to support the Revolution and to engage with the expected influx of visitors from Latin America to the Caribbean island. Such findings are significant because they evidence the role of the socialist bloc countries in Cuba and Havana’s burgeoning relationship with the socialist world following January 1959. Moscow may have played the most prominent role, but other socialist bloc countries were important actors. This pattern continued throughout the thirty-year period – for example, in Cuba’s accession to the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in the summer of 1972, and again in the early 1980s, when East German security services assisted their Cuban counterparts in modernizing their practices and systems.

Our Comrades in Havana also contains detailed analysis of the economic relationship between Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern European states. Yordanov reinforces the point that the Cuban Revolution replaced pre-1959 economic dependence on the US with a comparable level of economic reliance on the socialist bloc. In connection with the role of the Eastern European countries, it is interesting that he emphasizes the degree of unity between the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies regarding the Cuban Revolution. According to Yordanov, this unity persisted throughout the period from 1959 to 1991. Yet, this raises further questions. Did tensions between Moscow and the European socialist bloc materialize at any point in these years. What discussions were taking place between the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc regarding Cuba? These are issues that remain largely unaddressed in Our Comrades in Havana.

Yordanov also details the significance of the unique nature of the Cuban Revolution, which is fundamental to understanding not just the focus of Our Comrades in Havana but Cuba in general. He shows how this distinctiveness shaped the role of the Eastern bloc countries, particularly regarding attempts to implement socialist economic orthodoxy in Cuba, as its relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe developed. This became especially significant during periodic moments of tension. Importantly, Yordanov also notes that the Cuban leadership expertly learnt how to engage with their socialist colleagues for their own objectives, resulting in Cuba having influential “friends” throughout the socialist bloc who advocated on their behalf. In sum, despite ideological and practical differences, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba learnt to live with one another. Cuba’s importance for the socialist bloc was further reinforced by its prominent role in the Global South, exemplified by its three-year Presidency of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) from 1979. Regarding the thirty-year period of the relationship that forms the focus of Our Comrades in Havana, and the tensions that may have existed between the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba, alongside the unique nature of the Cuban Revolution, Yordanov succinctly concludes: