Document 31-5: Erich Honecker and Fidel Castro (1974)

Revolutionary Brothers-in-Arms

The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) provides a good example of the pervasive influence of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Fidel Castro (b. 1926) and his fellow revolutionaries did not set out to create a Communist state. They wanted to level the economic playing field, but this desire was not driven by ideology or pursued in concert with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, when the revolution finally succeeded in toppling the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973), the United States, acting on Cold War imperatives, immediately launched a campaign to undermine the new government and depose Castro. These policies gave Castro little choice but to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, an alliance that only grew stronger over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. This photograph of Fidel Castro embracing East German leader Erich Honecker (1912–1994) illustrates the close ties that had developed by the mid-1970s between the Soviet Union and Cuba.

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© ddrbildarchiv.de/Morgenstern/Bridgeman Images.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. How might this photograph have been interpreted by the majority of Americans in the mid-1970s? By the Cuban people? By the Soviet people?
  2. Compare and contrast Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union to the relationship between East Germany and the Soviet Union. What similarities and differences do you note? Did either Cuba or East Germany have much say in its own social and political development?