Struggling for Sovereignty, Changing Political Alliances: Western and Eastern European Military Assistance for Revolutionary Cuba During the Early Cold War

Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley

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While the history of interactions between the superpowers during the Cold War is a well-known topic, minor actors continue to receive much less scholarly attention. Cuba, for example, did not become part of the international agenda until its 1959 revolution challenged U.S. hegemony and turned the country towards Communism. In 1962, this conflict eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War. During those first years of the revolution, Cuba took a spectacular turn from being a Western ally to becoming a member of the socialist bloc. Unbeknownst to many, scholars, Cuba had initially turned to Western European countries to acquire arms in order to secure its newly-gained sovereignty, but the U.S. government frustrated these attempts by means of an arms embargo and political pressure on its Western allies. This presentation analyzes military assistance provided to revolutionary Cuba by Western and Eastern European countries and assesses the impact of U.S. pressure on Cuba’s accelerated turn towards Communism. By focusing on Europe’s role in Cuba’s quest for sovereignty, this opens a discussion on current dynamics of Europe’s stance on Russia’s war on Ukraine where we can observe a similar change in political alliances, albeit in the contrary direction.

Dr. Albert Manke (he/his) is a Senior Researcher at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and currently a member of the research group “Internalizing Borders: The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime.” His professional interests follow a globally entangled perspective on the histories of mobility and resistance in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. His areas of expertise include Latin American Studies, New Cold War History and Migration Studies with a special focus on power asymmetries, exclusion, racism, and agency.

Albert Manke studied philology, philosophy, and history in Cologne and Paris and holds a PhD in History from the University of Cologne. From 2017 to 2018 he was granted the first Tandem Fellowship in the History of Migration (with Dr. Lok Siu) at the University of California, Berkeley, as a fellow of the German Historical Institute Washington’s Pacific Office. From 2019 to 2022, he became a research fellow at that same institution as a member of the Max Weber Foundation’s collaborative research project “Knowledge Unbound.” In both periods, he was also appointed as visiting scholar at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley, where he conducted research on transnational migrant networks, migrants’ agency, and exclusion in a historical perspective. In Germany, he has worked as a researcher at Osnabrück University, at Bielefeld University, and at the University of Cologne, where he also served as principal investigator at the Global South Studies Center and co-directed the interdisciplinary Project of Excellence “Ethnicity as a Political Resource – Perspectives from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.”

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.