Many viewed the Tiananmen Square massacre as a crime, but the Cuban dictatorship saw it as an opportunity.

How the events of June 4, 1989 in China allowed Havana to rekindle relations with Beijing

 

A crime against the Chinese people by the Chinese Communist Party

Thirty six years ago the non-violent Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement was subjected to a military crackdown in which at least 10,000 Chinese people were killed.

The United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Chinese students condemned the crackdown by the “People’s Liberation Army.” Chinese students around the world took to the streets and protested the bloodshed in Beijing.

People of conscience the world over were horrified. Beijing was diplomatically shunned.

Cuba’s dictatorship endorsed the Tiananmen massacre to normalize relations with Beijing

In contrast, the dictatorship in Cuba saw an opportunity to rekindle and old friendship. Together with North Korea, and East Germany expressed their support for the actions taken by Beijing.

Cuban foreign minister Isidoro Malmierca commended Chinese authorities for “defeating the counterrevolutionary acts.” Fidel Castro openly supported Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, as a means to both preempt reform elements in the Cuban regime, and improve relations with Beijing.

Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen’s visit to Latin America took place in the midst of the crackdown, and he described the contrast between Havana’s warm welcome and the disapproval of many other countries in the region.

“The crackdown in Beijing, Qian says, completely changed the atmosphere around his tour: many Latin American governments expressed their disapproval of the suppression and cancelled his visits, and even the overseas Chinese, who usually greeted visiting Chinese officials with enthusiasm, had“stern faces” and questioned the reasons for using force. Qian had planned a visit to Mexico before Cuba. The Mexican government cancelled his visit but allowed him to go to Cuba via Mexico City.”

[…]

“But Qian’s reception in Havana exceeded his expectations. He was greeted by the Cuban foreign minister at the airport and brought to a welcome dinner the next evening hosted by Fidel Castro himself. Castro had a long talk with Qian at dinner which continued in his office until midnight. Understanding Qian’s situation, Castro gave him a detailed description of what had happened in Beijing since 4 June and the international response, based on his collection of information and from his own perspective. Castro said that he “completely supported the Chinese government” and would offer “whatever occasions and facilities” Qian might need to make his government’s voice heard.”

Cuba-Sino relations: From a warm embrace in 1960 to a decades long chill in relations

Communist China and Cuba had been close in the first years of the Castro regime. Mao Zedong had already been in power in China for a decade when the Castro regime took power in Cuba in 1959.

On September 28, 1960 the Cuban dictatorship diplomatically recognized the People’s Republic of China.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a Cuban delegation’s visit to Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in November 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Americas.

Subsequently, between 1960 and 1964 the two regimes collaborated closely together.

Mao's regime in 1958 had embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to reorganize the Chinese populace to improve its agricultural and industrial production along communist ideological lines. The campaign was a disaster that led to mass famine and a death toll of at least 45 million which did not end until 1962.

The visit by the Cuban delegation at the time did not go unnoticed in Mainland China. Dimon Liu was born in China and immigrated to the United States in 1965. She wrote about her early experiences growing up in the midst of the Great Leap Forward in 2017 and her first encounter with Cuba while still in China.

It was 1960, the height of famine during the years of Great Leap Forward. I was a child living in the southern city of Guangzhou in China. Meal time meant a little rice, and whatever we could scrape together. For nearly two years, we had no meat, fish or even cooking oil. We were starving.

All of a sudden, there was cane sugar from Cuba, and we school kids had to learn Cuban songs. We had been on rations even before the Great Leap Forward which began in 1958. Thirty jin (one jin is about 1.1 pound) of grains per month for an adult, and fifteen jin for a child above the age of seven. Two jin of meat and two ounces of cooking oil, also for a month. [...] People on our streets were dying of many infectious diseases, though no one dared to say anyone died of hunger.[...]

Frank Dikotter, the historian at the University of Hong Kong who wrote "Mao's Great Famine", a book about this period, said in a social media post that "the first thing the regime did in September 1960 was to procure an extra 100,000 tons of grain and ship it to Cuba," in order to help break the economic blockade imposed by Washington on the island. Dikotter added that "you can feed about 2000 people for a day with a ton of rice... Or over half a million people for a year."

Properly fed people rarely existed in China at that time, unless you belonged in the very small and exclusive club of Chinese Communist elite. For a child like me who received coupons for under 8 pounds of rice a month, you could have fed more than 2 million of us for a year; or about half a million Chinese adults for a year on a standard ration of 30 jin, or 33 pounds of rice per month for the amount of grain sent to Cuba.

Cuba was not the only place that China exported food to during those harrowing years.

In the midst of the Great Famine, while tens of millions of Chinese died of hunger, Beijing exported food to their communist ally in Cuba.

Relations between China and the Castro regime cooled, and completely deteriorated following a February 6, 1966 speech by Fidel Castro that was heavily critical of the Peoples Republic of China. Havana finally sided with Moscow in the Sino-Soviet split.

Criticizing Mao

Castro, while receiving Soviet subsidies, would continue to slam the Chinese Communists in the 1970s.

Journalist Chieu Luu, in his CNN article “Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China: Communist regimes that never saw eye to eye” published on November 26, 2016 recalled the late Cuban dictator’s critique of Mao Zedong in 1977.

“I believe that Mao (Zedong) destroyed with his feet what he did with his head for many years. I’m convinced of that. And some day the Chinese people, the Communist party of China will have to recognize that,” Castro told American journalist Barbara Walters in May 1977. He went on to list what he said were Mao’s grave mistakes: a cult personality and abuse of great power. “I also acquired that power, but I never abused it, nor did I retain it in my hands,” Castro said. Although both Cuba and China were functioning Communist states, Castro told Walters he viewed China as a “good ally” of the US, which was a bitter enemy of Cuba.

How Moscow drove Cuba into improving relations with Beijing

Russia’s democratic spring in the mid to late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev led to a cooling of relations between Havana and Moscow.

Perestroika was a policy that recognized economic central planning was a failure, and pursued reforming and restructuring the Soviet economy, and Glasnost was a policy that sought “more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information.”

These policies both instituted were viewed with great dread, and rejected by the Castro brothers. This was at a time when 75% of Cuba’s commercial exchanges were with the Soviet Union, but that did not stop Havana from censoring Soviet publications, and the beginning of the Castro brothers’ outreach to Beijing in 1989.

Havana’s successful engagement with Beijing: Harming U.S. interests and security

Backing the massacre of thousands of Chinese nationals by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the orders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) resulted in Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s high-level visit to Cuba in 1993. This was followed by Raul Castro’s first visit to China in 1997.

Prior to this, Beijing quietly began in 1992 jointly operating intelligence bases targeting the United States from Cuba, according to Chris Simmons, a former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s Western Hemisphere counterintelligence research section, revealed to the Miami Herald on July 4, 2024. He said that U.S. surveillance services were unaware of the arrangement until 2001, operating undetected for a period of nine years.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a report in December 2024 that identified four places in Cuba it believes are most likely to be aiding China’s intelligence activities against the United States. One of the authors of the report Ryan C. Berg, Director, Americas Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Andrés Martínez-Fernández, Senior Policy Analyst, Latin America, Allison Center for National Security, testified before Congress on May 6, 2025. They point to these spy bases in Cuba being upgraded with new technology.

This restored “special friendship” between two Communist dictatorships was founded on the mass killing of Chinese civilians by the PLA in June 1989, and Havana’s public support for this crime against humanity.

Following this rapprochement, it is believed Havana began offering their biotech knowledge, gained from Moscow, to their counterparts in Beijing, and in 2002, China and Cuba signed a formal agreement to produce monoclonal antibodies.

By 2004 Cuba had joint ventures in China that included both biotech, and genetic engineering. Douglass Starr in Wired Magazine on December 1, 2004 reported on this phenomenon in the article “ The Cuban Biotech Revolution“.

What Cubans call “the Special Period” produced one notable success: pharmaceuticals. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, Cuba got so good at making knockoff drugs that a thriving industry took hold. Today the country is the largest medicine exporter in Latin America and has more than 50 nations on its client list. Cuban meds cost far less than their first-world counterparts, and Fidel Castro’s government has helped China, Malaysia, India, and Iran set up their own factories: “south-to-south technology transfer.”

In 2015, then vice-president Miguel Diaz-Canel visited Beijing and praised Havana’s collaboration with Communist China in the sphere of biotechnology. Granma, Cuba’s official national communist newspaper, reported on the Cuban vice-president’s visit to a biotech facility in China.

“Díaz-Canel emphasized the notable progress made by Cuba and China in the sphere of biotechnology over recent years while also highlighting the close collaboration that the two countries share in the sector; providing great benefits and knowledge for both peoples.”

Without Havana’s joint ventures over the past 20 years in Cuba, Beijing may not have been in a position to have the capability to run a biotech / genetic engineering lab like the one in Wuhan that caused so much tragedy during the COVID pandemic.

Modernizing big brother for the 21st century

Raúl Castro met with China’s Minister of Public Security on December 1, 2024, and Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei are providing Havana censorship tools that are used to block information, track dissidents, silence dissent, and shut down the internet during anti-government protests.

Communist China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on June 4, 2024 described Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla as a “good old friend of China.” Rodríguez’s official visit from June 5 to 9, 2024 as a special envoy of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel highlighted the two communist regimes’ “special friendship.” Never forget that this rekindled friendship was forged in the blood spill 36 years ago in Tiananmen Square.