Cane sugar—the product we toss into our tea without a second thought—found itself at the center of a geopolitical fault line that split the Caribbean into two worlds.
To understand what happened in 1960, you first need to understand what Cuba was before that. The island, stretched out like a crocodile between Florida and Yucatán, had lived for decades on a single crop. Sugar cane covered Cuba’s plains the way wheat covers the Kansas prairies, and it determined everything just as thoroughly: who was rich, who was poor, who ruled, and on what terms. The Cuban economy was built like a pipe: cane grew, became raw sugar in local mills, was loaded at the port of Havana, and headed north—to the United States, which got around a third of all the sugar it consumed from Cuba.
The mechanics of this dependency were codified in law—through the system of sugar quotas. Washington set the amount of sugar each supplier country could sell on the American market at a guaranteed price, usually above the world price. Cuba’s quota was enormous and formed the backbone of its foreign-currency earnings. The system had worked for decades, with its own brutal logic: Cuba got a stable income, while the United States got a dependable supplier right next door and a powerful lever of influence. So long as the quota existed, the Cuban government—any Cuban government—was tethered to Washington by an economic leash that did not even need to be pulled taut. It was simply there.
When Fidel Castro came to power in January 1959, that leash was still holding. The revolution had won, but sugar still went north, and American companies still owned the island’s oil refineries, sugar plantations, telephone networks. Post-revolutionary Cuba resembled a person who had changed heads while the body remained the same—with all its habits and dependencies.
In February 1960, Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Cuba—the First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, a man with vast experience in trade negotiations. The visit resulted in a trade agreement under which Moscow committed to buying roughly a million tons of Cuban sugar annually for five years. The Soviet Union also extended Cuba credit and promised to expand supplies of oil, machinery, and industrial goods.
What always gets me is how fast everything started spinning. Just over a year had passed between the revolution’s victory and this agreement—and here was a Caribbean island that had traded with its neighbor across the strait for its entire modern history, turning toward a partner nine thousand kilometers away, across the Atlantic. In January 1961, Che Guevara would put it with his characteristic bluntness: the Soviet Union’s purchase of Cuban sugar was a political gesture, devoid of purely economic motivation. Moscow did not need Cuban sugar in such volumes—beet sugar was produced at home and in the союзные states. But the Kremlin needed Cuba—the first socialist state in the Western Hemisphere, one hundred and forty kilometers from Florida.
For the Cuban side, though, this was more than ideological fraternization. Castro and his circle understood that conflict with Washington was inevitable—the agrarian reform had already touched American property on the island, and relations were worsening by the month. They needed a backup market, and they needed one urgently. In essence, the February agreement was an insurance policy: if Washington cut off the oxygen, Havana would still be able to breathe.
After that, events rushed forward like dominoes set too close together. Soviet oil began arriving in Cuba—and the question immediately arose: who would refine it? The island’s refineries belonged to American and British companies—Esso, Texaco, Shell. Washington instructed them—or at least strongly recommended—that they refuse to process Soviet oil. The companies complied.
Havana’s response was predictable and radical: the Cuban authorities nationalized the refineries. It was a blow after which relations between the two countries entered a phase of open confrontation. The Eisenhower administration responded with the weapon it had at the ready: the sugar quota. In July 1960, Cuba’s quota for the current year was officially cut from 3 119 655 to 39 752 short tons. The figures speak for themselves—from Cuba’s sugar flow into America, there remained only a thin trickle, less than one and a half percent of the previous volume.
For the Cuban economy, this was like a dairy farmer who sells milk to one buyer suddenly finding that buyer has shut the door. Washington’s reasoning was formally logical: Cuba was reorienting itself toward trade with the USSR and barter deals, so it did not need the American market. In reality, it was economic warfare—an attempt to strangle the revolutionary regime by depriving it of its main source of income. The calculation was that without the American market, the Cuban economy would collapse, and Castro’s government with it. The calculation failed.
Soviet-Cuban economic cooperation, which grew out of the February agreement of 1960, was not simple barter in the spirit of “you give me a sack of sugar, I’ll give you a barrel of oil.” To call it that is to reduce to caricature a complex system of interstate trade agreements built on planned prices, long-term credits, and clearing mechanisms.
How did it work? Cuba and the USSR agreed on sugar prices, fixed within trade protocols and generally far above world exchange quotations. This was a deliberate subsidy—Moscow overpaid for Cuban sugar, and both sides understood that. In return, Cuba received Soviet oil, machinery, equipment, fertilizer, foodstuffs—also at negotiated prices. Settlements were made through clearing accounts: instead of moving currency back and forth, the parties kept mutual accounts of deliveries and periodically balanced them. One side’s deficit was covered by loans—and those loans, of course, came on preferential terms.
It cannot be said that the USSR instantly and completely replaced the American market. The transition took time and came with disruptions, shortages, logistical chaos—rebuilding trade routes across the Atlantic instead of through the Florida Strait is not as simple as flipping a switch. Cuban ports, designed for the short haul to the American coast, now had to service ships crossing the ocean. The Soviet merchant fleet built up its presence in the Caribbean gradually. But by the mid-sixties, the system was operating at full strength: the USSR had become Cuba’s main trading partner, and Cuba itself the largest recipient of Soviet aid in the third world.
Here is what genuinely troubles me about this story: salvation turned into a trap, and the trap was built on precisely the same principle as the old dependency. Before the revolution, Cuba was hooked on sugar with an American syringe. After 1960, the syringe became Soviet, but the needle stayed the same.
The Soviet market, generously paying inflated prices for Cuban sugar, created a powerful incentive not to change the structure of the economy. Why develop industry, diversify agriculture, build new export sectors, if cane was already bringing in guaranteed income? The Cuban leadership made attempts at industrialization—Che Guevara, who headed the Ministry of Industry, dreamed of Cuban factories—but the gravity of the sugar economy proved stronger than revolutionary ambition. By the end of the sixties, Havana had returned to a strategy of maximizing sugar production, and the famous 1970 campaign to harvest ten million tons—the “safra”—became the symbol of that choice. The goal was not met, and the mobilization of resources to pursue it dealt a blow to other sectors.
A monocrop economy is a fragile thing, like a one-legged stool. It stands only while someone is holding it up. The Soviet Union held up Cuba’s stool for three decades. Trade agreements were renewed, sugar prices remained preferential, oil flowed, loans were written off or restructured. Cuba, in turn, became Moscow’s reliable ally in Latin America and Africa—political loyalty was part of the unwritten contract, though it never appeared in any trade protocol, naturally.
And then the hand holding up the stool disappeared. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought down upon Cuba an economic catastrophe whose scale is hard to overstate. Preferential sugar prices vanished along with the state that had set them. Supplies of oil, fertilizer, spare parts for machinery—everything that had kept the Cuban economy afloat—were slashed dramatically. Cuban GDP fell by an estimated 30–35 percent in the first half of the nineties. The “special period in peacetime” began—that was what the Cuban government called the era when electricity on the island was cut for twelve, sometimes even twenty hours a day, urban transport came to a halt, and the average Cuban’s caloric intake dropped sharply.
The dependency that had taken thirty years to form revealed itself with brutal clarity. The sugar industry, deprived of Soviet fertilizer and equipment, began to contract. Production, which in its best years had reached seven to eight million tons, fell to two or three million in the 2000s, then lower still. Mills closed, fields grew over. The kind of irony that leaves bitterness in the mouth: the monocrop for whose preservation Cuba had tied itself to the Soviet market ultimately deteriorated without that market so badly that by the 2020s, the island—once one of the world’s largest sugar producers—was forced to import it.
The February agreement of 1960 was the point at which revolutionary fervor, the imperial logic of two superpowers, and the inexorable arithmetic of tropical agriculture converged. It saved the Cuban revolution from economic strangulation and at the same time determined the form in which that revolution would exist for the next three decades: an island producing sugar for a distant northern country in exchange for oil, machinery, and the right to remain itself. When that distant northern country ceased to exist, the island remained—with its cane fields, rusting mills, and a question that still has no answer.