Sex, Race, and Revolution: Cuba in Soviet Imagination and Memory

Anne Gorsuch (The University of British Columbia)

Abstract: This talk explores the longings, desires, and anxieties underpinning the early Soviet-Cuban relationship. It focuses on the place of Cuba in Soviet film, newspapers, and television, but also considers the cross-cultural experience of Soviet and Cuban citizens traveling and living abroad. The dominant metaphor of the relationship in the early 1960s was passion, a Soviet romantic passion for the Cuban revolution and a concomitant nostalgia for an idealized Soviet past. There was also mistrust and perceived danger. This was particularly evident in Soviet discourses about the gendered and racialized Cuban body, including the virile Cuban man, the consumptive pleasures of sex associated with Cuban women, and the impoverished black body believed to be in special need of Soviet assistance. It was in the realm of sexuality, as well as in norms and experiences concerning race, that Cuba most challenged Soviet expectations, values, and modes of expression. The project intervenes in three historiographical conversations: the history of late socialism; the history of the global 1960s; and the history of relations between the Soviet Union and the Third World.

Speaker: Anne Gorsuch is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She works on the cultural history of the Soviet Union, with a focus on youth, gender, and tourism. At present she is working on a cultural history of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Cuba in the 1960s, examining in particular the place of Cuba in the cultural (visual, literary, cinemagraphic, touristic) imagination of the Soviet Union in the1960s and the movement of Soviet and Cuban citizens between the USSR and Cuba as tourists, delegates, and students. 

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES Russian Studies Seminar Series.

Convenors: Philippa Hetherington (UCL SSEES) and Simon Huxtable (Loughborough)