Workers of the World, Divide! The Collapse of Solidarity Between China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba

On the 1st of October, 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the existence of a very new state in a very old country. He announced the creation of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the balcony of a palace where Ming and Qing dynasty emperors would customarily accept their “Mandate of Heaven” to rule the land of China.¹ This “Gate of the Heavenly Palace” (in Mandarin: Tiān’ānmén) would one day become synonymous with Chinese political repression, but in 1949, it served as Mao’s stage to declare to the international community that a new dynasty had wrested control of the millennia-old Chinese state. In the traditional Chinese conception under the Ming and Qing, China was the undisputed center of global power, and all other kingdoms could engage with it only through a system of subservient tributary relations.² In 1949, though, China had been racked by nearly four decades of on-and-off civil conflict as well as the devastating Japanese campaigns of the Second World War; the People’s Republic was overwhelmingly poor and scarcely recognized by foreign nations, but Mao and his allies were committed to restoring China to the very apex of world affairs. With the PRC preaching communism, the logical beginning for China’s climb back to the top was seizing the reins of the global communist movement. For the next forty-two years, the duration of the Cold War, China’s restorationist goals would grind against similar campaigns for international revolutionary leadership by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Cuba. The single-minded desire of the successions of self-styled “great men” leading all three countries, each promoting a slightly different communist philosophical ethic, would poison the potential for solidarity between the three and fracture 20th-century global communism irreparably. Cuban, Chinese, and Soviet plays at socialist primacy not only benefited the United States, theoretically communist internationalism’s chief enemy, but also birthed a violent tripolar international order that smeared the final years of the Cold War with the blood of people in the Global South who never signed up to be pawns in a great power competition. The ideologically intransigent diplomacy of Cuba, the PRC, and the USSR ultimately gave way to crude self-interest, coloring the history of Cold War communist international relations not as “the Moscow-Beijing entente” but rather as the infamous “Sino-Soviet Split.”

Sino-Soviet Relations Before the Split

In the earliest days of the PRC, officially declared in 1949 as Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces fled to the island of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland via the ports of Xiamen and Shanghai, the attitude of Josef Stalin’s USSR towards Mao’s PRC was largely one of stern paternalism. Throughout the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), during which the Communists conducted guerrilla campaigns against both the KMT and the Japanese Empire, CCP forces accepted some Soviet aid but kept the colossus of the North at arm’s length.³ In 1935, the Moscow-controlled Communist International, a union of global Marxist-Leninist parties meant to spread Soviet-style communism worldwide, had sent Otto Braun, a left-wing German military intelligence officer to South China, to assist the CCP in a civil war in which, at that point, they were losing badly.⁴ Braun took issue with Mao’s concept of “protracted people’s war,” a guerrilla strategy that relied on long-term informal support from peasants, pushing instead for more traditional combat tactics; Mao, however, was able to rally CCP officers against Braun as the KMT’s superior air force forced the Communists out of their enclave in Jiangxi province.^{5 6} After Braun’s dismissal, Mao led his troops on the rest of the famous 6,000-mile “Long March” with little to no Soviet support.⁷

Even after the Communists’ 1949 victory, Stalin was hesitant to acknowledge Beijing as an ally on equal footing with the USSR. The relationship between the two states was dogged by Soviet chauvinism, with Stalin’s cadre regarding the CCP as a pupil organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Stalinism as the only legitimate form of socialist political thought. When Mao visited Moscow for the first time in the winter of 1949-1950, Stalin—after nearly a month of negotiations—agreed to sign a new “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance” to rework the pact that the Soviet Union had previously made with the KMT in 1945. However, Stalin not only went seventeen days without meeting Mao, making the CCP chairman, per a telegram he sent that day, “so angry that [he] pounded the table,” but also left China deeply unsatisfied with the treaty provisions.⁸ In a January 1950 telegram to Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s chief theoretician, Mao cabled from Russia that he and Stalin “mean[t] to put off the solution of the problem… until a few years later,” referring to the diverging interests of the USSR and China pertaining to the United States.⁹ The USSR had fought alongside the US as an Allied power in World War II, receiving $11.3 billion worth of weapons and strategically important goods from the US via the Roosevelt Administration’s “Lend-Lease Program,” and the terms of the Potsdam Declaration laid out an international order that featured a degree of US-USSR power sharing.¹⁰ Although Stalin told Mao outright that he viewed the US as unlikely to pursue aggressive military action against the Communist Bloc, the Soviet Union necessarily benefitted more in 1950 from stable, if pugnacious, East-West relations than China did. In 1949, Stalin had lifted the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, bringing to an end roughly a century of outright military confrontation between great powers in Western Europe.¹¹ Henceforth, the US and USSR tacitly agreed to do battle only on the territory of proxies along the imperial peripheries of both Washington and Moscow, which is to say, colonized and formerly-colonized countries. The key imperial players of the world wars were not to be subjected to such indignities. Mao viscerally feared that such grace did not extend to China. He left Moscow in February 1950 with a mutual-defense guarantee that only referred to Japan, $60 million worth of credits per year until 1955, and an exchange of sovereignty where Beijing recognized Soviet-backed Mongolia and Moscow returned parts of Manchuria to Chinese control.¹² To many Chinese Communists, the Korean War confirmed their suspicions of Soviet negligence in the fight against Western imperialism. Chen Jian, a leading scholar of the Cold War in China, argues in a paper for the Cold War International History Project that Zhou Enlai was prepared to order Chinese troops into Korea without Soviet support and notes that Stalin cabled CCP leadership just seven days after China intervened in the war, asking them to “reconsider the decision.”¹³ Although the Soviet Union did eventually lend air support to the cause of Kim Il-Sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), China emphatically conveyed the message that it was neither a satellite of the Soviets nor a second-rate power.

When Stalin died in 1953, Sino-Soviet relations improved considerably. At his funeral, the three Soviet leaders who were grappling to take his place—Georgi Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Nikita Khrushchev—invited Zhou Enlai to stand at their side rather than sequestering him with the other ambassadors and foreign heads of state in attendance.¹⁴ When Khrushchev consolidated power, he dedicated enormous economic assistance to the CCP’s “First Five-Year Plan,” a nationwide development program modeled on the Soviet model of industrialization. Between 1954 and 1959, the total technical, personnel, and financial aid totaled 7% of the USSR’s gross national income, making Khrushchev’s contributions to 1950s China “the largest assistance program ever carried out from one country to another.”¹⁵ At this point, both the Soviet Union and China turned their attention toward the Global South, with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization extending to the reversal of the former dictator’s inward-facing philosophy and the CCP at last free to pursue peacetime diplomacy after decades at war. As such, the late 1950s saw an uptick in Sino-Soviet involvement in leftist political parties across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As countries across those regions sought their independence, however, the more confrontational attitude with which their leaders faced the question of global imperialism put Khrushchev and his allies ill at ease. Most notably, Soviet leaders considered Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution “unorthodox” because the Moscow-approved Popular Socialist Party in Cuba had little to do with the initial rebellion that triggered Castro’s takedown of the once-US-backed Batista regime.¹⁶ Moscow soon reluctantly inaugurated an alliance with Havana. Not only did Castro’s victory spur the USSR to further engage with Latin American radicals in a bid to avert another unauthorized revolution from seizing control of a Latin nation, but it also cemented the perception that the CCP was more committed to global revolution than its Soviet counterpart, given the surge in agrarian-focused or even nominally “Maoist” movements in Central and South America since 1949. Soviet unease intensified in 1961 as US President John F. Kennedy undertook a US troop buildup in South Vietnam; Khrushchev refused to be drawn into a tit-for-tat escalation of the Vietnam War, which was indeed not yet considered a full-scale war on the US homefront, fueling the schism between the cautious Soviets and the sanguine Chinese.¹⁷

The Sino-Soviet Split

Amidst a succession of increasingly fervent domestic propaganda campaigns in China, the CCP elite turned on Khrushchev. In an attempt to shore up popular support in the face of the controversial agricultural policies that would grow into the disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” which eventually caused 10.3 million deaths due to famine, Mao began the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in 1957, ostracizing and persecuting over 300,000 intellectuals by the end of the year.^{18 19} This swing to the hard left did not spare the domestically liberalizing Khrushchev, who many Chinese Communists viewed as a traitor to the legacy of the more immoderate Stalin; Peng Zhen, Beijing’s lead CCP official, branded the General Secretary of the CPSU “patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical” in 1960.²⁰ Conversely, Khrushchev, put off by mass death under Mao and the insults of the CCP, canceled Soviet technological cooperation with China, pulling out funds and experts later that year.²¹ Furthermore, the CCP governor of Guangdong, China’s most populous province, held an event in February 1962 where he slammed Khrushchev as a false friend of the proletariat: As far as I know his son-in-law often stays in the United States and keeps himself in frequent touch with U.S. high-ranking officials. What do they talk about? People scarcely know. As to Khrushchev’s daily life, it is aristocratic. He has two private cars, a villa and two very fine television sets. Perhaps he wants to own everything in pairs and finds this convenient! But to us, the leaders, these are not necessities for the time being. If we need transport, we can board a plane, a train or a motor vehicle, none of which is privately owned; for recreation we can go to the clubs and the public stadium to enjoy ourselves; as to living quarters, we do not own houses, we rent them from the government. It may be that we don’t want to live as Khrushchev does!²²

Months later, these tensions came to a head with the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, taking the Sino-Soviet Split from an ideological spat to a full-blown rupture of the international communist movement. After a thirteen-day confrontation over the stationing of Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev and Kennedy agreed to terms of mutual de-escalation, with the Soviet Union withdrawing its nuclear presence from Cuba in exchange for a US nuclear pullout from Italy and Turkey.²³ For the imperial cores of the two clashing blocs—the capitalist First World’s core being NATO and the Soviet Communist Second World’s core being Eastern Europe—this agreement represented an outstanding success, a step back from the brink of nuclear destruction. In Havana, however, the deal amounted to a surrender, a betrayal, and Castro did not want to leave his national defense in the hands of a Soviet government that appeared to be a “paper tiger,” as Kremlinologist William Garner described it in 1968.²⁴ The fundamental disconnect between the foreign policy interests of communists in Latin America and Eastern Europe rested in the fact that the US constituted an existential threat to the success of Latin American leftism while being a mere competitor to the USSR. While the risk of nuclear conflict loomed understandably large in both American and Soviet minds, the prospect of a ground war between the two great powers was highly unrealistic at the turn of the 1960s. Not much had fundamentally changed since 1949, when Mao wrote to Liu Shaoqi that “the [US] Americans ask other countries to fight the war [for them]”; if anything, Khrushchev’s liberalization had made the US-USSR relationship even less likely to spiral into a clash of armies.²⁵ For Latin America, on the other hand, the clash of armies was a fait accompli: in 1954, the CIA had backed a coup against Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Árbenz to prevent his progressive program of land reform, and in 1961, Kennedy ordered an unsuccessful amphibious invasion of Cuba.^{26 27} In the eyes of many Latin American communists, Khrushchev could visit the US—as he did in 1959, becoming the first Soviet leader to officially travel to the West—to rub elbows with capitalist politicians and wax poetic about “peaceful coexistence” only because the bipolar US-USSR world order promised perks for its two poles that it would not afford to anyone else.²⁸ Just as the US had allowed Moscow to brutally crush democratic uprisings in Communist Hungary in 1956, the USSR extended the courtesy to Washington by not intervening on behalf of Guatemala in 1954 or Cuba in 1961 and standing up for Castro’s government for a measly thirteen days before recalling Soviet missiles from Cuba.²⁹ The message was clear: the great powers could exercise unilateral and aggressive military force unmolested in their geopolitical neighborhoods, and the Third World was a legitimate zone for more competitive shows of force. Mao, weighing his options and considering the chilly reception he initially received from the Soviet Union, chose to cast his lot with the Third World, becoming a founding member in the Cuban-led “Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America.” He bonded with Castro over Soviet fecklessness and their mutual desire to export revolutionary communism across Latin America.³⁰ This desire, though, was only really implemented in Peru, where the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla army declared a protracted people’s war against the military government in 1969.³¹

Indeed, two factors contributed to a resurgence of Soviet support in Latin America throughout the remainder of the 1960s: the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in the USSR and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution in China. In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin collaborated to depose Khrushchev on grounds of incompetence, resulting from an accumulation of foreign policy failures epitomized by the worsening Sino-Soviet Split.³² From 1964 until 1980, the two men put the Kremlin through a drawn-out tug-of-war for control of the USSR, with Brezhnev gradually seizing the reins of state and boxing Kosygin out. Neither man being a foreign policy aficionado, the diplomatic posture of the Soviet Union became less dogmatic and more experimental in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s dismissal. In 1966, Kosygin agreed to mediate talks between India and Pakistan in a bid to secure a lasting ceasefire in the Kashmir Dispute, resulting in the “Tashkent Declaration,” which prevented a broader international escalation of the conflict and ensured the long-term non-alignment of India.³³ A Soviet diplomat present at the three-nation conference remarked that:

Events in India have the attention of the entire world. This vast country of 500,000,000 people is determining, not only the destiny of India itself, but important questions of the future of Asia. India has for years been an influence in the balance of progressive and reactionary forces in the international arena.³⁴

Such a reframing in CPSU circles of non-alignment as a noble stance against Western imperialism rather than the moderate form of it demonstrates that the Soviet Union faced pressures to grow less ideologically discerning in its choice of international partners. Just seven years after icing out Castro for forming a heterodox communist party, the USSR’s embrace of decidedly non-Communist India confirmed the ardor with which Moscow was courting the “People of Asia, Africa and Latin America” for whom China purported to speak. As the USSR turned away from pure ideology, China turned firmly toward it. At the inaugural meeting of the Cuban Third World solidarity organization in 1966, hardline Chinese diplomats alienated African and Latin American delegates with their vituperation of the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” with the West.³⁵ According to the January-February 1966 edition of the pan-Communist magazine Communist Affairs, China’s diplomatic overtures at the conference failed miserably:

In November [1965] a group of Chinese “tourists” had paid an 18-day visit to Cuba. The group’s leader was Lá Hsi-san, a member of the CPC international liaison department, which works to extend contacts with foreign Communists. The first delegate to arrive in Havana was a member of the Peking delegation. He arrived Dec. 14 and was joined almost at once by other early arrivals from China, who apparently were ensuring themselves ample time for pre-conference lobbying and discussions. Nevertheless, Chinese pre-conference moves were on the whole not very effective. They were unsuccessful in opposing the inclusion in the Conference of reference to peaceful coexistence, nuclear tests or disarmament; not a single country supported them. They protested against the proposed attendance of pro-Soviet groups from countries which also had pro-China factions and were supported by the Vietnamese, but the general opinion went against them. The exclusion of the Yugoslavs was a minor triumph for the Chinese, but it was their only one at the preliminary meetings.³⁶

This uncompromising CCP attitude towards other states occurred in the context of one of the largest campaigns of political repression in human history: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The “Cultural Revolution,” as it has since been less propagandistically rebranded by Mao’s more moderate successors, contained two phases of era-defining mass violence by Chinese against Chinese.³⁷ Although the Cultural Revolution’s decentralized manifestations make parsing the blurred lines between its sub-epochs a difficult proposition, broadly speaking, the first phase—a true “revolution” in that it subverted the existing structures of power—lasted from 1966 to 1968, and the second phase—a reactionary counterpurge by the military establishment against its enemies—lasted from 1968 until 1976, when the whole affair descended into internecine factional conflict in Beijing.³⁸ All in all, during the decade between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution “caused 1.1 to 1.6 million deaths and subjected 22 to 30 million [people] to some form of political persecution,” according to the political scientist Wang Yuhua, with most of the violent deaths in question coming during the reactionary period of state repression.³⁹ Amidst this repression, through which the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) managed to usurp control of China’s domestic and particularly foreign policy, the unceremonious end of the US war in Vietnam and Mao’s increasing fear of the Soviets pushed the US and China to pursue a rapprochement process beginning in 1972 and concluding after Mao’s death in 1976. This normalization process would go on to permanently cleave China away from the USSR and make way for the tripolar power model that would frame international relations until the end of the Cold War. In the following years, Deng Xiaoping, after securing his spot as the CCP’s strongest post-Mao figure, effectively Sovietized much of the Chinese economy, largely disintegrating the notional conflict between the USSR and China as a rift between agrarian and industrial socialism. Thereafter, realpolitik accrued influence in the foreign policy apparatuses of all three great Cold War powers, and ideology took a back seat. However, the forces driving the initial estrangement between Moscow and Beijing relied fundamentally on the parallel developments of Maoism and the Soviet-style command economy, both doctrines whose parameters were tested in the political crucible of 20th-century Latin America.

Marxist Ideological Competition in Latin America

The first flush of nominally “Communist” parties in Latin America modeled on the CPSU and its early Bolshevik leaders depended on Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s wishful prediction that the fall of Tsarist Russia, the perennial arsenal and creditor of right-wing European movements, would inexorably topple Europe’s fragile capitalist hegemony, beheading the global imperial system of exploitation and swiftly giving way to worldwide revolution.⁴⁰ Unfortunately for the Communists, however, the successful defense of Warsaw in the 1918-1921 Polish-Soviet War impeded the westward march of the Bolshevik Red Army, preventing the confederation of “Soviet republics” that would soon become the USSR from spreading communism to Germany, the most industrialized country in mainland Europe at the time.⁴¹ Lenin and his comrades, swamped by a lengthy civil war raging in Russia, left their Central and South American imitators to fend for themselves in the 1920s. Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet brand of Marxism that entailed hierarchical, authoritarian one-party rule, did not mesh well with the on-the-ground conditions of most Latin American countries for two reasons. First, except in Mexico, where the incumbent Partido Revolucionario Institucional outlawed the Catholic Church during the 1926-1929 Cristero War, Catholicism held spiritual if not outright political influence across the political spectrum in Central and South America, clashing with the harshly-enforced state atheism demanded by Marxist-Leninists.⁴² Second, the decentralized Spanish-American model of caudillismo, in which charismatic leaders (caudillos) build localized agrarian power bases and command loyal private armies, stood opposed to Lenin’s call to assemble an intellectual vanguard to harness the revolutionary energy of urban wage laborers.⁴³ Thus, in the absence of material support or strategic guidance from Moscow, the original party-line Marxist-Leninists of the Americas achieved next to nothing in the 1920s and 1930s, staging only one revolt, the failed 1927 Coluna Prestes in Brazil, and winning no elections.⁴⁴ Incipient Maoism enjoyed a more obvious appeal. At least in theory, protracted people’s wars appeared more realistic across the Americas, where the historic foundations of insurgent power aligned with China’s. Although the percentage of Latin Americans living in municipalities with more than 20,000 residents sat at 25% in 1950, between China’s 10% and the USSR’s 32%, the legacy of the Spanish-American states’ independence processes endowed them with a propensity for rural-reliant guerilla warfare.⁴⁵ Despite a slew of rapid secessionist conflicts during and after the successful revolutionary wars of Spain’s mainland American colonies from 1808 to 1821 fragmenting the four American viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire—New Spain, New Granada, Perú, and Río de la Plata—into nine constitutional republics, Latin America began to buck the global trend of internal conflict as they aged. By the early 20th century, Latin America’s civil wars were exclusively non-secessionist: they advocated revolutionary regime change.⁴⁶ Andreas Wimmer, a sociologist of civil conflict, notes:

In general, Latin America’s civil wars are not well described by our model. Despite high degrees of ethnic exclusion in many countries (of the Amerindian population in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, or of the black populations in many former plantation societies), none of the civil wars have been fought along these lines. The pathways leading to revolutionary civil wars not covered by our model seem to be traveled with considerably higher frequency in Latin America than elsewhere.⁴⁷

While secessionist or nationalist internal conflicts depend on cosmopolitan, urban centers’ insurrectionary energy to disseminate national literature, unite the national intelligentsia, and serve as a capital-in-waiting, diverse anti-government coalitions not rooted in any particular region or culture, like those typical of Latin America after independence, rely less on the urban middle class and can build valuable support networks among the peasantry. China, having more peasants by percentage than all of the mainland Latin American countries, unsurprisingly demonstrated more rural political consciousness than the USSR. On the decentralization axis, Maoism also won out: although Mao would turn vehemently against Confucius later in life, for the first decade of the PRC, he maintained the time-honored Confucian principle of devolving nationwide control to provincial governors, allowing for local autonomy and significant self-determination for minority nationalities.⁴⁸ Latin American communists rallied around Mao; the PRC hosted left-wing activists from Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Chile, and Guatemala within three years of its existence.⁴⁹ Even the official, Soviet-line “Communist” parties understood the benefits of Mao’s decentralized, agrarian politics: in 1953, the Bolivian Communist Party’s José interrupted a meeting of Bolivia’s largest trade union congress to demand that a proposed land reform bill be replaced with a new proposal, a nearly word-for-word Spanish translation of China’s 1950 Land Reform Law.⁵⁰ The CCP formalized its outreach to Latin America in 1956, when the “Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries” sent a cultural delegation to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil; in 1958, the preeminent Chinese state-owned radio station doubled its Spanish broadcast time, which reached 21 hours per week by the end of the decade.⁵¹ The somewhat cordial Sino-Soviet relationship at this moment even convinced Khrushchev to place the Brazilian Communist Party under the express tutelage of Beijing.⁵² One Latin American state—Cuba—would pioneer a new socialist political platform while tightening its ties with China; the CCP, though, would eventually discard Cuba as insufficiently radical.

Fidelismo

Mao’s early focus on land reform left the CCP top brass somewhat disconnected from the urban proletariat. Indeed, Mao classified the peasantry as a revolutionary class, a break with Marxist orthodoxy that removed the urban wage worker from its philosophically privileged position. This decentering of urban organized labor left unions in major cities dissatisfied with CCP leadership; between 1952 and 1957, five labor demonstrations against bureaucratic or autocratic management took place in Shanghai and Taiyuan, with dozens more protesting more concrete indignities like politically-motivated pay docks.⁵³ Although Chinese urban diets substantially increased in nutrient richness from 1953 to 1957, the rapid industrialization of the First Five-Year Plan did not contribute to the increased political influence of urban labor leaders or CCP officials.^{54 55} Moreover, the CCP’s morality laws were far more permissive toward the cultural quirks of rural provinces and minority regions than the cosmopolitan youthquake taking place in China’s largest cities, especially given the KMT’s long period of pro-Western social policy in the cities they controlled, which included most of the former Western treaty ports, coastal cities where imperial powers like Britain and France could sell manufactured goods, on China’s eastern seaboard.^{56 57} The CCP, despite its history with the New Culture Movement, cracked down early on such displays of “bourgeois reactionary thoughts” as drug use and vagrancy.⁵⁸ Thus, the potential issue for Mao, Zhou, and Liu rested not in the abject material conditions of urban laborers driving them into revolt—although these days would come—but rather the stunted political ambitions of urban Communists and social liberals occasioning an interregional power struggle, the last thing China needed in the 1950s. Simultaneously, the man Mao would eventually brand as “the little Khrushchev of the Caribbean” had developed a program of urban-rural synthesis that Mao would manipulate abroad to score points against the USSR in the Global South but fail to model domestically, to the ultimate detriment of China.⁵⁹

In part due to the far more widely-documented and notorious labor crackdowns of the USSR, union leaders and trade congresses in the Western Hemisphere somewhat soured on the role the Soviet state played in international socialism.⁶⁰ The PRC’s disdain for peaceful coexistence with the US and its more full-throated support for Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government in Cuba earned it curious support from Latin American organized labor. In his 1961 survey of Sino-Latin relations, Daniel Tretiak explains the moment that made this hidden group of supporters clear to the CCP:

…[T]he Chinese apparently found some Latin American union leadership highly interested in the hard-line of the [PRC] when some of that leadership attended the World Federation of meeting in Peking in June 1960. Comments from Brazilian, Chilean, Venezuelan, Mexican, and some Central American pro-Communist labour unionists were extremely favourable to development in China, omitted praise for Soviet leadership, and expressed interest in the use of armed struggle against pro-American governments in Latin America.⁶¹

Castro’s early synthesis of the interests of trade unions and poor farmworkers fueled his success in toppling Batista.⁶² Although Soviet-backed organized labor, namely the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC), stood against Castro’s “July 26th Movement” until the eve of its victory, Castro deployed targeted political maneuvers over the course of his rise to power that lessened the diverging interests of the peasantry and proletariat, winning their support as individual citizens rather than as members of a work team or commune.⁶³ This approach distinguished Castro from the Eusebio Mujal of the CTC, who not only was a notoriously corrupt man with a $280,000 salary in an impoverished country, but also benefited from the perks of capitalism under Batista.⁶⁴ Historian of revolutions Steve Cushion summarizes these perks in his book on the Cuban revolution:

Trade unions, as their name implies, are organised around sectional divisions that reflect the economic structure of capitalism, which in turn institutionalises the divisions between different groups of workers…As long as the role of a union is seen as defending workers’ interests within the capitalist mode of production, with its differential wage structure, these divisions will remain…The trade union…has developed interests of [its] own, different from the mass of workers they represent, which depend on their ability to mediate between capital and labour. This leads to a more conservative social view, even amongst those who started their trade union career as class conscious militants, with a resulting propensity to vacillate.⁶⁵

Thus, when the July 26th Movement formed a strike committee in Guantánamo in August of 1957 to spread anti-regime protests in the wake of the brutal police killing of one of Castro’s guerillas, they shut down the city within a day by coordinating guerilla actions with the growing general strike.⁶⁶ The strategy to which Octavio Louit, the leader of the July 26th Movement’s Sección Obrera (labor wing) credited this victory subverted the typical union structure. Louit boasted of núcleos obreros combativos (combative workers’ cells) that brought together small numbers of urban workers, sometimes across professions, to synchronize the actions of the resistance in the countryside and in the cities.⁶⁷ After forcing Batista out of the country permanently and assuming the Cuban prime ministership in February 1959, Castro moved quickly to bolster urban-rural solidarity. He pushed through the Rent Reduction Act, which redistributed roughly 15% of Cuba’s total wealth from landowners and industrialists directly to laborers and peasants.⁶⁸ On a political level, programs like Cuba’s rural literacy campaign enlisted young revolutionaries in the cities to volunteer in the countryside, reducing interregional animus while also boosting Cuba’s outcomes in education, healthcare, and infrastructure.⁶⁹

Mao praised Castro because the CCP chairman saw Cuba as a launchpad for China’s aspirations to Third World leadership. In the early 1960s, this Chinese offensive gained little traction outside of Cuba, with Beijing-funded socialist coups failing in Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil between 1961 and 1964.⁷⁰ Still Castro collaborated closely with Mao, buttressing the latter’s attempt to co-opt global revolution. Even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two nations signed a five-year trade agreement that allotted $60 million of agricultural development aid to Cuba and Chinese assistance in planning the Cuban sugar industry.⁷¹ After the Cuban Missile Crisis stunted Soviet-Cuban relations, Castro followed Mao’s lead in doing away with the influence of the Soviet-style education system in Cuba, which both men saw as overly intellectual, in favor of broader vocational programs.⁷² Kosygin fought hard to win back the support of Cuba from the Chinese Communists, and the Soviet aid drive he directed benefitted the Cuban sugar industry with far more success than the Chinese aid package.^{73 74} In January 1966, Cuba terminated its Chinese rice import quota, bringing an end to Sino-Cuban agricultural cooperation and infuriating Mao.⁷⁵ As the CCP’s radical wing continued to ascend in power, however, the calls for isolation and dogmatism inside China grew louder. On May 16th, 1966, Mao’s declaration of subversive elements within the CCP was published nationwide, marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and severing any immediate chances of reconciliation with Cuba.⁷⁶ The most important factor in the undoing of Fidelismo’s potential sway over global politics came as a result of its failure to capture any Latin American governments but Cuba’s. When the Castro domino effect did not materialize, the caudillo of Havana lost his shot at leading the Latin American struggle against the US.

In 1966, Fidel Castro proclaimed Cuba’s most notoriously communistic policy: level income.⁷⁷ Essentially, Castro resolved Cuba’s ideological “great debate” over central economic planning by opting against the Khrushchevist model of government bonuses to highly productive workers.⁷⁸ Jettisoning the individual focus he had favored early on, Castro leaned heavily into a collectivization regime that combined the USSR’s strict party control with China’s commune-style economy. In the spring of 1968, Castro rolled out his most authoritarian plan yet: the “Revolutionary Offensive” essentially conscripted all available Cubans into military-style work brigades that were forced to contribute to the 1970 sugar harvest.⁷⁹ Quickly, Cuba became the country with the highest percentage of nationalized firms on any continent; Castro also came out firmly in favor of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, indicating a degree of solidarity with crackdowns against more populist socialism.⁸⁰ Amidst this jarring pivot, Castro also tried to position Cuba as the principal state in a new Latin American political order. Around 1966, Castro dispatched his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara to South America, assigning him to put together fidelista guerilla cells in Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru; although these uprisings gained some ground with some in the ranks of the dissatisfied rural poor, Argentina’s military intelligence was too robust, and Guevara had no political strategy for courting indigenous people in Bolivia or Peru.⁸¹ In 1967, Bolivian forces executed Guevara. On the diplomatic front, Cuba was not much more successful. Soviet-backed communist parties held back from fully lending their support to the spread of Fidelismo, even when Moscow purported to work with Castro, whose radical bent turned off even sympathetic nearby states like Mexico, which was the only member of the Organization of American States to maintain diplomatic ties to Cuba after the Cuban Missile Crisis.^{82 83} Cuba’s repeated encouragement of radical leftism in Mexico frustrated Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who began pushing the US line in his talks with Cuba.⁸⁴ Castro’s catastrophic policy pivot was a bid to maintain power against liberals in his coalition who wanted normalization with the US and demanded “Fidelismo without Fidel.”⁸⁵ For the remainder of the decade, Castro vigorously centralized Communist power in Cuba, hoping to homogenize the once diverse segments of the July 26th Movement with his nationalization campaigns. He succeeded in uniting Cuban leftists but squandered Cuba’s political capital with leftists abroad. The failure of the much-awaited labor-intensive 1970 sugar harvest ended Cuba’s idealistic visions of global revolution and Cuban leadership of the Latin American cause, and the pragmatism Castro was forced to adopt was reflected in the status of the Sino-Soviet Split in the late 1960s. Castro had tried, as part of his push for Cuban primacy, unsuccessfully to distinguish his foreign policy from that of the USSR. He bucked Brezhnev at the UN by voting against the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1968, considering it a play at the dreaded doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the US.⁸⁶ Additionally, many of the insurgent groups he supported in Latin America were enemies of the CPSU-approved parties in their respective countries. Soviet leaders found this insubordination to be of such concern that they allegedly deputized Aníbal Escalante, a former Cuban revolutionary demoted by Castro, to oust Castro in favor of more CPSU-friendly Cuban Communists.⁸⁷ Escalante was caught and imprisoned as a part of Castro’s largest purge in 1968, but Cuba could not resist the influence of the USSR forever. From 1969 to 1970, during the bungled Revolutionary Offensive, Soviet sugar subsidies to Cuba increased 99.2%, and in 1972, Castro agreed to adopt a Soviet economic planning stratagem and fall under the USSR’s auspices in the Moscow-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.⁸⁸ The ideological selectivity of the 1950s no longer seemed feasible to Third World communist parties as the violence of the Cold War intensified. Latin Americanist William Garner wrote in 1968 that “the Chinese have allowed many Marxist-Leninists to cloak their growing impatience with the rate of change [coming from the USSR] in the façade of the Maoist position,” yielding a number of “Maoist” parties in the Global South that neither practiced nor even understood Maoism.⁸⁹ Conversely, many parties long estranged from the USSR, including the Communist leaders of Romania and Yugoslavia, softened their stances towards Moscow to distance themselves from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution.⁹⁰ As socialists the world over retreated from ideological rigidity to more shrewdly position themselves in the geopolitical arena, the beginnings of a similar process were forming in hardline China.

China’s Turn to Realism

During the reactionary latter half of the Cultural Revolution and into the beginning of the Dengist reform era, the PLA accumulated pivotal political power in China where it had previously been outflanked by civilian CCP apparatchiks. During China’s First Five-Year Plan and Mao’s escalating leftist campaigns, Beijing was serious about restraining the power of the military. After the Korean War ended in 1953, Mao ordered a demobilization plan that would see China’s military spending fall from 42.5% of overall budget expenditure in late 1951 to a mere 8.3% in 1960.⁹¹ The first of the radical purges, the Sufan Movement and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, relied not on the PLA to enforce terror but instead on community actions mere steps away from protracted people’s wars. In fact, the first of many high-level Communist leaders to fall victim to a Maoist purge was army marshal Peng Dehuai, the inaugural target of the 1959 “Anti-Right Deviation Struggle.”⁹² The political winds changed direction for the PLA, however, when in July 1968, the CCP Central Committee called in the armed forces to quash the student uprisings and workers communes that had sprung up during the insurgent phase of the Cultural Revolution. One of the student radicals suppressed at this point, Ding Xueliang, describes his sudden reversal of fortunes:

A few people called the “dictatorship team” came in. The person who was declared a criminal was dragged out of his seat. Then, two from the dictatorship team would hit the person’s legs with their rods so that he kneeled. Then they’d handcuff you and announce your crimes. They shoved your head down. The rest of the audience would shout slogans, and you were dragged away. It was scary; you never knew who’d be next.⁹³

The PLA held tightly onto their newfound political capital even as the cultural counterrevolution died down. The USSR’s aggressive subjugation of Czechoslovakia’s 1968 Prague Spring demonstrations and the 1969 border clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers in Manchuria left Mao terrified of an impending Soviet invasion.⁹⁴ Thanks to this panic, the PLA was able to step further into the topline fray of the CCP. Chen Jian and Cold War international relations historian Odd Arne Westad explain the personal maneuvers of this period:

As the country suffered, political infighting at the top intensified. The main trend in 1970– 1971 was still the increased role of the army, with Lin Biao as its leader. Many of the new provincial [CCP] secretaries were army people, as were many of those who staffed the central [CCP] institutions that were slowly reemerging after the chaos of the late 1960s. Though some leading officers were skeptical of Lin’s leadership skills, or fell afoul of his inconsistencies, the overall feeling among the generals was that Lin Biao was a better alternative than the Cultural Revolution leadership, which most of them despised intensely.⁹⁵

The increased control of the PLA drove China into a repressive, conservative period. To quiet the voices of students, the PLA closed most of the universities and high schools not already ruined by interfactional combat; of course, this move also quieted the already hushed voices of educators and academics.⁹⁶ The military also turned its back on the PRC’s record of relative respect for minority nationalities, singling out Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols for repression. In the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the PLA framed the ethnically Mongol former CCP Vice-Premier Ulanhu for organizing a fictitious Soviet-backed separatist plot.⁹⁷ In the purges that followed Ulanhu’s removal, the army arrested around 800,000 Mongols—over 30% of Inner Mongolia’s total population in 1970—and killed around 100,000.⁹⁸ The PLA’s crackdown from 1968 to 1976 pulverized the few remaining progressive aspects of Mao’s PRC: advances in the rate of education, rights for women and minorities, and expanded local autonomy dissipated whilst the army sternly disciplined the rowdy Red Guards.

Against the backdrop of this political whiplash, Lin Biao’s corps made good on their promise to court the US. Although members of the CCP hard left like Mao’s wife Jiang Qing opposed any collaboration with the American government, which they viewed as irrevocably imperialist, the moderates were able to secure Zhou Enlai as an emissary to secretly meet with US President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger in 1971.⁹⁹ Reprising the power-sharing playbook behind the Khrushchev-era thaw in US-USSR relations, Kissinger offered a gradual pullback of US assets from China’s regional sphere of influence. Once an end to the Vietnam War was brokered, he assured Zhou, the US would “permit the political solution of South Vietnam to evolve and to leave it to the Vietnamese alone,” in addition to suggesting a full US military withdrawal from Southeast Asia and Taiwan.¹⁰⁰ The next year, Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit China, signing the “Shanghai Communiqué,” which publicly pronounced the consensus Zhou and Kissinger had achieved. The only red line the two countries drew was in Korea: otherwise, the US seemed to be done with its forward presence in the Asia-Pacific region.¹⁰¹

US authorization of effective Chinese regional hegemony both validated the PLA’s sway over China’s foreign policy and neutered China’s aspirations of sponsoring global leftism. In 1974, Mao and Zhou, by then both already weathered by age, set their diplomatic sights on ties with capitalist West Germany.¹⁰² They understood US-aligned Western European countries, most of which were NATO members, as a trap in which to entangle the Soviet bloc. Mao saw the USSR as fundamentally expansionist and “social imperialist,” so he resolved to induce the Soviets to pursue expansion or, at least, low-level conflict on their western front in Central Europe rather than their southern front: Mongolia and China.¹⁰³ The Shanghai Communiqué only accelerated the path of Beijing’s realist, non-ideological diplomatic posture, and the batch of soft-right CCP leaders set to succeed Mao concurred with this orientation. In 1974, as the reformer Deng Xiaoping built back his power after his 1968-1971 internal exile, he called on the influential army to form a base of support.¹⁰⁴

In 1976, Zhou and Mao both died of old age. In the time between Zhou’s passing in January and Mao’s passing in September, the CCP hard left responded to the refusal to disperse of a Beijing crowd of Zhou’s mourners by ordering the massacre of the demonstrators and manipulating the crisis to demote Deng and pull the increasingly senile Mao back to his radical roots.¹⁰⁵ Once Mao died, however, he was no longer able to insulate the leftist “Gang of Four,” consisting of Jiang Qing and three other Cultural Revolution hardliners, from the profound unpopularity of their policies. Twenty-seven days after the chairman breathed his last, his presumptive successor Hua Guofeng collaborated with Deng’s inner circle to arrest the Gang of Four and consolidate power around the broad, moderate coalition that has governed China since.¹⁰⁶ Most Chinese supported or accepted the autocoup, but the hard left Shanghai Revolutionary Committee organized protest marches with a prescient slogan: “Never allow the experience of the Soviet Union to be repeated in China.”¹⁰⁷ The Revolutionary Committee and their ilk were by then already bound for the ash heap of history, but their warning proved somewhat accurate: as paramount leaders of China, Hua and eventually Deng would rerun much of the domestic and foreign policy of the Khrushchev thaw, just on a different Communist polity. Once Deng boxed out Hua in 1978, he turned to an economic policy not unlike Khrushchev’s centrally-planned experimental market strategy of sovnarkhozy, promoting modest autonomy for provincial governments to facilitate centrally-assessed competition between them.¹⁰⁸ Deng also ordered the testing of different policies in different regions, like those that occurred under sovnarkhozy, with Sichuan and Guangdong pioneering, respectively, the rural and urban economic systems he would go on to expand nationwide.¹⁰⁹

Deng repeatedly criticized the legacy of Khrushchev to domestic and international observers, but the details of these statements suggest that Deng’s ire focused more on Khrushchev’s personal style than his political or economic program. In 1974, Deng had argued that “making a clear break with Khrushchev’s line was impossible” for Brezhnev and Kosygin, who continued many of their predecessor’s policies while easing Khrushchev’s assault on intraparty democracy, an ironic analysis given Deng’s employment under Mao at the time.¹¹⁰ Still, when members of Deng’s government lobbied him to advance a normalization process with the USSR, he refused outright.¹¹¹ In his view, an imperialist power that shared a strategic area of interest with China could never be China’s friend.¹¹² Thus, counterintuitively, the tradeoff for China’s softening and, to a certain degree, Sovietization of their economy was a sustained aggressive posture towards the USSR itself. In fact, Deng gave an interview to an Italian journalist in August of 1980 where he predicted an impending Third World War:

The [World] war is inevitable because the superpowers exist and because their imperialism exists. And the inevitability of war isn’t just a view of the Chinese: many people in the world are convinced that the war will break out in the ‘80s. The next 10 years are very, very dangerous. They are frightful…It is since the end of the Second World War that the people in the West keep talking about peace and detente, and so does the Soviet Union. But where is the peace, where is the detente? Year by year, if not day by day, the hot spots increase, the factors which will drive to the third world war, and those people go on chatting about peace and detente.¹¹³

Despite this bluster, however, the only war the Chinese under Deng fought against a Soviet-aligned military was the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, in which the China invaded the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to stop their southern neighbor from ousting Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, one of China’s few remaining incumbent proxies after the diplomatic calamities of the Cultural Revolution period.¹¹⁴ Vietnam, to Deng’s surprise, repelled the PLA and successfully installed a Hanoi-backed government in Cambodia, but the war’s outcome revealed less about the final chapter of Cold War politics than did its belligerents: unlike the Vietnam War that had ended roughly a decade earlier—where, per 1967 CIA estimates, the USSR sent North Vietnam 45,000 tons of aid each month and provided 50% of North Vietnam’s yearly overseas imports—Brezhnev’s refused to directly deploy Soviet force against China, instead simply continuing the logistical assistance to Hanoi that the KGB had been supplying throughout the Vietnamese campaign in Cambodia.^{115 116} As the dust settled following China’s shocking defeat, their new US partners coaxed them into accepting a model whereby all three great powers could expand without stepping on each other’s toes. This system of three poles—Beijing, Moscow, Washington—would redefine Cold War competition in the 1980s.

Tripolarity and its Consequences

The tripolar dynamic between China, the US, and the USSR during the 1980s was an extension of the détente between Washington and Moscow following the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement.¹¹⁷ Following this preliminary collaboration between Brezhnev and Nixon on stepping back from the nuclear brink, US defense spending declined sharply.¹¹⁸ Even so, Cold War conflicts in the Third World persisted, with conflict escalating the most in Africa and the Middle East, far from either the Soviet or American immediate sphere of influence. The superpowers still reaped their own benefits from their more direct bilateral de-escalation, with trade between the US and USSR increasing throughout the 1970s and peaking in 1979 at 1% of the US’s total trade volume.¹¹⁹ Soviet militarism, however, did not fall off as a consequence of détente like Nixon’s diplomatic team had expected; the USSR’s defense spending increased as a percentage of its total gross national income from 1970 to 1975 and again from 1975 to 1980.¹²⁰ Then, on December 27th, 1979, the USSR deployed troops into its proxy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to suppress the anticommunist rebels of the Islamist mujahideen, seizing the reins of Afghanistan’s already mostly subservient government in the process.¹²¹ To US President Jimmy Carter, this invasion, similar in strategic value—though starkly different in opponent—to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, marked the failure, and therefore the end, of détente. Moscow’s apparent head start on militarization gravely threatened US interests. In 1979, the US accounted for 56.2% of NATO’s total defense spending, and in a bipolar system, the imbalance of brute force between the two great powers suggests an impending war.¹²² Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski did not view the world at the turn of the 1980s as essentially bipolar: they saw China as a great power, and they needed to make sure that Deng felt the same way. US thinkers preferred tripolarity to bipolarity at this point because it seemingly promised a lower risk of any power’s elimination. Dylan Motin outlines this line of thinking as such: Assume that A, B and C have more or less equal resources. If A seizes B’s resources, C would have no means to compensate for the resulting imbalance of power. Consequently, C has to assist B to prevent A’s victory. In such a configuration, no great power would ever be eliminated. A great power under attack will always receive the unconditional assistance of the neutral third. Since coalitions against the aggressor emerge automatically and quickly, a pole has little incentive to attack another and should be content to keep the status quo…In a bipolar system, a weakening pole is unlikely to survive for long since any power imbalance is impossible to correct.¹²³

With the benefit of historical hindsight, many present-day political scientists argue that the USSR was, in fact, economically spiraling in the 1970s and 1980s, that Carter and Brzezinski had little to worry about, but the Soviet-Afghan War demonstrated Brezhnev’s confidence, and the US saw itself falling militarily behind its sworn enemy. To remedy this divide, Brzezinski presented Deng with the opportunity to create a united front against the USSR. The two men subsequently reached an agreement on Taiwan, where the US theoretically accepted the principle that Taiwan was a continued belligerent in the Chinese Civil War rather than a republic independent of China, and Deng propositioned Brzezinski for advanced US technology that China could use to outgun the Soviets.¹²⁴ Although Brzezinski could not fully oblige, given US export restrictions pertaining to Marxist-Leninist states, Israel began supplying the PRC with “missiles, avionics, tanks, and more” at the beginning of the 1980s.^{125 126} Although the US gradually lowered weapons export barriers for China until 1989, the Israeli defense industry had served as a middleman for US military aid to regimes that the White House did not wish to publicly support since at least 1977, so Israeli support to the PRC also fell in line with US interests.^{127 128} The Soviet-Afghan War exemplifies the success of the US’s handing off to China the responsibility for fighting the USSR on its borders. China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region became one of two major staging grounds—along with northern Pakistan— for the incorporation of foreign aid, external training, and technical assistance to the mujahideen, with the PLA assisting in instructing its fighters, many of whom were Sunni Muslim volunteers from beyond Afghanistan.¹²⁹ The PRC also delivered up to $400 million worth of artillery to the mujahideen in the 1980s, more than double the CIA’s estimate for the total PLA budget in 1979.^{130 131} Deng continued to support the anti-Soviet effort over the course of the decade, committing combat aid to fight the USSR’s proxies in Sri Lanka and Ethiopia, although in 1982 he declared the “independence and self-sufficiency” of China’s global stance, trumpeting to the world that China was not a US-aligned power but a neutral pole choosing to collaborate against the concerning power of the Soviet Union.¹³² Tripolarity did not immediately give way to peace, though: both the frequency and the deadliness of armed conflicts crescendoed in the 1980s, with the starkest increases by both metrics coming from the Middle East, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa.^{133 134} Because neither of those regions were in the explicit neighborhood of any of the three great powers, the tripolar system unsurprisingly made them more violent, because it combined an increase in military capabilities with a disincentive for the US, China, or the USSR to fight each other directly, as they did in Korea and Vietnam.

Conclusion

Cuba, at this point a satellite of the USSR with hardly a foreign policy program to speak of, could not continue its resistance to the US in Latin America. The US ramped up its anticommunist violence in the region in 1975, when Henry Kissinger and the CIA financed the creation of Operation Condor, the first explicitly militaristic pact between the US and multiple Latin American countries.¹³⁵ Operation Condor brought together right-wing military dictators in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and, eventually, Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru; throughout the campaign, the armed forces of each of these countries kidnapped, tortured, and killed tens of thousands of suspected leftists, marking a graphic escalation in the lengths to which the US was willing to go to assert dominance over its sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.¹³⁶ In 1980, the situation escalated again with the election of Ronald Reagan, whose political program sought the downfall of global socialism in every regard, and during his term, US involvement in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua drove all three countries’ civil wars into their deadliest years.¹³⁷ In the period from 1975 to 1991, however, Cuba only dedicated its own troops, at the behest of the USSR, to conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, where the great powers were jockeying for control.¹³⁸ The Cuban dream of a Latin American uprising against the US fizzled out.

For a brief moment in 1958 and 1959, as the Cuban Revolution claimed its victory, Mao, Khrushchev, and Castro were nominally united. After the fallings-out to come, the three countries those men represented would never again be aligned all at once; the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 with the Sino-Soviet Split still potent across the continents. Were the raw, realist geopolitical interests of the three countries simply so divergent that a dispute was inevitable? That explanation seems unlikely, given Kosygin and Zhou’s mutual hopes of diplomatic rapprochement in the mid-1960s, the initial benefits of Sino-Soviet involvement in Cuba, and the fact that Soviet and Chinese economic development came into full swing only once each power implemented an economic program it had once belittled in the other. The most potent impediments to cooperation between China, the USSR, and Cuba were the egoistical projects of their leaders: Mao’s obsession with purifying the revolution; Castro’s self-appointed stint as representative plenipotentiary for the Black, Brown, and Asian people of the world; and finally, Brezhnev’s expansionist military buildup, the economic stroke of foolishness that cost Russia its colonial empire after two-and-a-half centuries of dominance in Eurasia. The structure of Marxist-Leninist ruling parties claims to eliminate factionalism, but it only serves to displace factionalism to one level below the very top, creating sycophantic competition for the approval of the paramount leader. Few achieved the insanities of Mao and Stalin’s reigns, but one-party rule in any context lends itself to cults of personality nonetheless. These cults had leaders from China, Cuba, and the USSR confusing themselves for their countries and failing to imagine a world beyond their term. As such, most of them felt the need to drastically reshape the world order within their own lifetime and, of course, on their own terms. The extent to which “great men” shape history remains a subject of debate, but the hazard of seeing “great men” in one’s own time shines through clearly in the Sino-Soviet-Cuban fiasco of the 20th century.