Since Vladimir Putin’s devastating invasion of Ukraine, much of the world has aligned to decry the bloodshed and to sanction Russia for its dangerous violation of international norms. As many nations have spoken in one voice to condemn Putin’s war, it has been illuminating to observe which countries have not joined the chorus.
We might expect Russian aggression to draw universal condemnation from formerly colonized nations, whose histories embody the brutality of imperial violence. But it hasn’t. One factor is the failure of the United States to provide a viable alternative — in the form of broad political and economic engagement — to Russia’s influence in these nations. This problem is exacerbated by the lingering damage done by the Trump administration to the United States’ global standing as a reliable international partner. While the Biden administration has made great strides toward repairing these fissures, much work remains.
Unless the United States can offer genuine, long-term engagement with these countries, it may find that it lacks consensus to condemn Putin on the global stage.
A critical example comes with Cuba. During and since the run-up to the Ukraine invasion, Cuban state media has parroted Russian propaganda in support of Putin’s actions, as well as Russian claims of genocide perpetrated by the Ukrainian government. It has also criticized the “hypocrisy” of sanctions against Russia. To some extent, this makes geopolitical sense. The Trump administration’s brutal policies toward the island practically eliminated desperately needed money transfers from Cuban Americans at a time when the coronavirus pandemic decimated Cuba’s tourism industry.
Such policy changes have left Cuba increasingly dependent on allies like Russia. One of the few countries that allows Cuban citizens to enter without a visa, Russia announced just before the invasion that it would allow Cuba to postpone some debt payments until 2027, as both nations announced a continued strengthening of ties in the face of the current crisis.
At the same time, however, the Cuban government’s failure to condemn the invasion conflicts with Cuba’s history of international solidarity with Ukraine. In early 1990, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and amid growing domestic turmoil on the island, Cuba’s government sent a delegation of scientists to the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl — site of the 1986 nuclear plant disaster — on a medical mission of mercy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the Ukrainian government largely unable to provide for the hundreds of thousands of people who needed medical care after the meltdown of a reactor at the Chernobyl plant, and Fidel Castro decided to intervene. This trip marked the beginning of what came to be known as the “Children of Chernobyl” program. From 1990 to 2011, more than 25,000 children, almost all Ukrainian, came to Cuba to receive treatment for their maladies. They were housed in the former resort city of Tarará, a beach community that lies 15 minutes from Havana’s city center.
Remarkably, this program was instituted as Cuba itself was reeling from unprecedented hardship brought about by the dissolution of the USSR. This period is known in Cuba as the Special Period: a time of intense scarcity in which the average Cuban man lost 20 pounds in the first year of the crisis alone. Additionally, 52,000 Cubans went blind, most of them temporarily, because of vitamin deficiency. No one knows how much the Cuban government paid to treat the children of Chernobyl, but experts estimate the cost in the billions of dollars. The government chose to incur these costs, however, and asked ordinary Cubans to bear them in the name of international solidarity.
This choice may seem odd — but not if one understands the role that internationalism had played and continues to play in the revolutionary government’s claims to legitimacy. From the moment of its inception, the architects of the revolution framed it as an anti-imperialist movement, a reaction against Cuba’s status first as a Spanish colony and later a pseudo-colonial state dominated by U.S. military and economic interests. International missions, both military and civilian, formed the bedrock of the revolutionary government’s assertions of global relevance. Cuba’s medical mission of mercy in Ukraine, undertaken in a former Soviet state in the wake of the collapse of the socialist bloc, was an attempt by the Cuban government to maintain its legitimacy in the new post-Soviet world order.
Today, the memory of the children of Chernobyl looms large in Cuba, viewed as a point of national pride by many of its citizens. In 2018, Cuban-Canadian filmmakers Rodrigo and Sebastián Barriuso released “Un Traductor” (“A Translator”), which tells the story of their father, a University of Havana professor who was tasked with interpreting for the children of Chernobyl. Co-produced in Cuba and Canada, the movie received favorable attention from Cuban state media outlets. HBO’s 2019 miniseries “Chernobyl” was viewed widely in Cuba, and 2021 saw the release of “Tarará,” a documentary that celebrated Cuba’s efforts to care for the victims of Chernobyl that was applauded by Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party.
More recently, while the world watched in fear and dismay as Russian forces assaulted Ukraine, Granma published an article about Tarará titled “Chernobyl in Our Memory,” a reflection on the author’s personal recollections of this moment of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. The article did not conclude, however, by decrying Russian violence against innocent Ukrainians. Instead, it ended with a plea to Ukrainians to adopt a neutral posture and not allow themselves to be led down the path of war by the United States and NATO, whom the piece referred to as “the drivers of hate” and the true architects of the ongoing conflict.
This disjuncture between the importance of the memory of the children of Chernobyl to many in Cuba and the government’s pro-Russian stance means those Cubans who have expressed support for Ukraine have been subject to state repression and, in at least one case, detention.
The Cuban government has thus taken up a paradoxical posture. Long serving as a voice for the downtrodden on the global stage, at least rhetorically, the revolutionary state now finds itself aligning with an imperial power, Russia, as that country engages in an illegitimate and bloody invasion of Ukraine, a former Cuban ally.
This paradox has not escaped the notice of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which issued a formal diplomatic note to protest the Cuban government’s Russia-friendly position during the first week of the invasion. But Cuba has not adopted this position in a vacuum. Ravaged by the pandemic and increasingly isolated because of the Biden administration’s failure to repair the political and economic damage done under Donald Trump, the Cuban government has further aligned itself with Russia. Thus far, in its willingness to freely admit Cuban citizens and ease the government’s debt burden, and with, until recently, Russia tourists flocking to the island despite the pandemic, Russia has proved to be a reliable international partner.
What’s more, Cuba is not alone: several formally colonized nations, including such U.S. allies as Vietnam, South Africa and India, have similarly failed to condemn Putin’s invasion. If the United States wants to build a consensus against Russia among such nations, it will need to work harder to repair the fissures caused by the previous administration and to regain the trust of the international community.