Cuba's First Military Doctors

2018 ◽  
pp. 46-62
Author(s):  
Don Fitz

In the 1960s and the context of mushrooming popular movements across the globe, the brutality of U.S. imperialism, the unreliability of the Soviet Union as an ally, and the Latin American Communist Parties' focus on the urban working class, Cuban leaders felt beckoned to help revolutionary projects in Africa. While Cuba sent soldiers, they also sent doctors. By the end of the 1960s, when the Cuban revolutionary government had been in power for only ten years, doctors had been involved in four different African political projects. Cuba's deployment of military doctors to Africa left profound impacts, both on the host countries and on the Cuban doctors, who were bound to secrecy and only began sharing their stories decades later.

Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.


Author(s):  
Vanni Pettinà

Drawing on new primary sources from former Soviet Union, US and Mexican archives this chapter analyzes the failed process of Mexican-Soviet engagement which took place between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. The chapter shows the factors which, for first time since the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, created the conditions for a bilateral rapprochement between the two countries. On the one hand, it shows how the ideological changes fostered by the new Khrushchev leadership made the Soviet Union particularly keen in strengthening its political and economic relations with Latin America and Mexico. Moreover, it shows how Soviet analysis of the international constraints the Western Hemisphere and Mexico faced in advancing their process of economic development fit squarely with Latin American desarrollista perception of the problem and recipes to fix it.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Denise Getchell

This article reevaluates the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup is generally portrayed as the opening shot of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere and a watershed moment for U.S.–Latin American relations, when the United States supplanted its Good Neighbor Policy with a hardline anti-Communist approach. Despite the extensive literature on the coup, the Soviet Union's perspectives on the matter have received scant discussion. Using Soviet-bloc and United Nations (UN) archival sources, this article shows that Latin American Communists and Soviet sympathizers were hugely influential in shaping Moscow's perceptions of hemispheric relations. Although regional Communists petitioned the Soviet Union to provide support to Árbenz, officials in Moscow were unwilling to prop up what they considered a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution tottering under the weight of U.S. military pressure. Soviet leaders were, however, keen to use their position on the UN Security Council to challenge the authority of the Organization of American States and undermine U.S. conceptions of “hemispheric solidarity.” The coup, moreover, revealed the force of anti-U.S. nationalism in Latin America during a period in which Soviet foreign policy was in flux and the Cold War was becoming globalized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-473
Author(s):  
Anna Björk Einarsdóttir

The fight against imperialism and racism was central to the Comintern's political and cultural program of the interwar period. Although the more immediate interests of the Soviet state would come to overshadow such causes, the cultural and political connections forged during this time influenced later forms of organizing. Throughout the interwar period (1918-39), the Soviet Union served as the core location of a newly formed world-system of socialist and communist radicalism. The origin of Latin American Marxism in the work of the Peruvian theorist and political organizer José Carlos Mariátegui, as well as the politically committed literature associated with the interwar communist left in the Andean region of Latin America, shows how literature and theory devoted to the indigenous revolutionary contributed to interwar Marxist debates. The interwar influence of Mariátegui and César Vallejo makes clear the importance of resisting attempts to drive a wedge between the two authors and the broader communist movement at the time.


Author(s):  
Nikita I. Khmarenko

The emergence of pedagogical technologies and their mass introduction dates back to the 1960s. Reformation of the American and European schools was provoked by reinterpretation of the learning goals. However, the historical roots of some pedagogical technologies are much older than studies of J. Carroll and D. Bruner – renowned authorities in this area of research. One of these technologies is cooperative learning. Initially recognized as a key component of humanistic pedagogy of J. Dewey, this technology has been further developed in works of many Soviet and foreign scholars. In the 1920s, the works by J. Dewey had a serious impact on the reformation of the Soviet education system, which aimed to educate the entire population of the Soviet Union. However, for some reasons, the gradual introduction of cooperative learning into learning process took a break in the 1930s. Since the late 1990s, a serious pedagogical crisis has emerged in the Russian Federation, which cannot be mended by traditional education system; it encourages many teachers to look at the well-studied pedagogical technologies from a different perspective. Today the social order sets new requirements concerning a major breakthrough in training a person. Teamwork and analytical thinking skills, the ability to lifelong self-education and self-develop-ment require fundamental changes in the traditional education system. At the same time, for the successful implementation of pedagogical technology, it is necessary to resolve a number of issues related to the essence of the concept of cooperative learning and the definition of components. Research relevance is indicated, the historical roots and essence of the concept of pedagogical technology of cooperative learning are determined, examples of the practical application of models of this pedagogical technology are exemplified.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-337 ◽  

This article analyzes socio-economic and cultural transformations in the Soviet village from the end of the 1920s until the 1980s. The authors identify the agrarian system of that time as state capitalism and reveal that during the 1950s and 1960s, capital that played a leading role in Soviet agriculture. The authors argue that the emergence of state capitalism was due to the interaction of the state, collective farms, and peasant holdings. The preservation of traditional peasant holdings allowed the state to build a specific system of non-economic exploitation, the core of which existed until the beginning of the 1960s. The authors connect the formation of agrarian capitalism with the creation of new rural classes. The authors conclude that from the 1920s to the 1980s, a combination of economic, political and socio-cultural factors led to the transformation of the agrarian society in the Soviet Union into the state capitalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 67-106
Author(s):  
Dan La Botz

The Soviet Union and the Communist International had an adverse influence on the Latin American workers’ movement, continually diverting it fighting for a  emocratic socialist society. They subordinated the workers’ movements to the interests of the Soviet Union’s ruling class, the Communist bureaucracy. At one  oment, they led the workers’ movement in disastrous uprisings, while in a subsequent era they encouraged it to build alliances with capitalist and imperialist power.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-70
Author(s):  
Ilia Valerievich Mametev

The article focuses on the problems of shadow economy, such as the illegal activity, as well as a legal activity hidden from the state control, which became an integral part of the life of the Soviet Union in the period of stagnation. The development of the shadow sector was connected, first of all, with the inability of the command-administrative system to take into account the demands of the population for certain goods and services. There have been examined prerequisites for the emergence of the shadow economy and the stages of its development in the society that built communism in the 1960s–1980s. The shadow economy contributed to the growth of corruption and criminalization, initiated the racket in the 1990s and significantly affected the public consciousness of the Soviet citizens and, later, the mentality of modern Russian society


Author(s):  
Jason García Portilla

AbstractThe anti-clerical elements of the Revolution helped Cuba succeed in various indicators (e.g. education quality and coverage, equality, health). The Cuban regime seized, dismantled, and limited the institutional influence of Roman Catholicism on these areas of public life. However, a strong cultural influence of a highly syncretised Roman Catholicism persists in Cuba even if its institutional influence has been curbed. Also, the Communist regime, by adopting Marxism, “threw the baby out with the bathwater” through persecuting all types of religion, including Protestant liberals. Finally, the Cuban regime conveniently turned to Rome to legitimise itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union and to silence Protestantism with a corporatist strategy. The socialist legal tradition had an effect opposite to its claims (e.g. lack of freedom, corruption), even if its anti-clerical element was an advantage. Comparing the Cuban experience to other Latin American countries with leftist dictatorships (e.g. Venezuela) helps understand their failure to achieve the Cuban indicators (e.g. education). The crucial factor in this regard is whether or not the power and influence of the Roman Church-State are reduced.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Wojciech Łysek

The article discusses the life and work of the outstanding Sovietologist Richard Pipes, who was born in a Polonized Jewish family in Polish Cieszyn. After an adventurous trip to the United States in 1939 and 1940, he graduated in history from Harvard University and devoted himself to scientific work. For the next half a century, Pipes dealt with the historical and contemporary aspects of Russia. In his numerous publications, including more than 20 monographs, he emphasised that the Soviet Union continued rather than broke with the political practice of tsarist Russia. In his professional work, he thus contested views prevailing among American researchers and society. From the 1960s, Pipes was involved in political activities. He was sceptical about détente, advocating more decisive actions towards the Soviet Union. Between 1981 and 1983, he was the director of the Department of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the National Security Council in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Although retiring in 1996, he did not give up his scientific activity. Pipes died on 17 May 2018; according to his last will, his private book collection of 3,500 volumes has been donated to the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.


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