Siurus specifies how representatives of the Chinese embassy in Havana are spreading negative propaganda and the Soviet Union in Cuba. Trade negotiations with Poland and Cuban sugar exports to Britain are also discussed.
January 24, 1964
From the Diary of A. S. Anikin, Record of a Conversation with the Ambassador of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to Cuba, Cde. Pavlicek, 4 January 1964
This document was made possible with support from Leon Levy Foundation
[Stamp]: Declassified
from the diary of
A. S. Anikin
Top Secret Copy No 2
24 January 1964
No 046/olas
RECORD OF A CONVERSATION
with the Ambassador of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to Cuba
Cde. Pavlicek
4 January 1964
I visited Pavlicek today and had a conversation with him.
1. Pavlicek noted that the Chinese representatives are playing a very active role in Cuba. The speeches of the Chinese ambassador and materials of the Xinhua [press] Agency bulletins contain, as a rule, attacks against the Soviet Union and the CPSU. The Chinese are using any opportunity to conduct propaganda among Party cadre, especially at the lower and middle levels, and they are drawing the attention of the Cuban public by any possible means to the facts of China’s economic and other aid to Cuba. Even such a fact as the departure of the ambassador for China has been used by them for a month already in order that the Cuban press in one or another form talk about China and the attention which they give to the Chinese ambassador to Cuba.
The Chinese propaganda activity is finding favorable ground among Party workers and part of the intelligentsia, and is creating great confusion regarding ideological questions in the minds of representatives of these categories of people. Several members of the National Leadership of the United Party of the Socialist Revolution are under the influence of the propaganda, primarily Ernesto Che Guevara.
As a whole the National Leadership has taken a so-called position of neutrality about ideological differences. It is characteristic that in personal conversations with representatives of socialist countries Cuban leaders demonstrate that they are on the side of the CPSU in the ideological dispute; however, they do not give any ideological guidance in this spirit to Party cadre and in their public speeches they do not touch on this question.
Pavlicek expressed the opinion that such a position of the Cubans in connected with the fact that it is possible that China in some form will support Cuba’s revolutionary activity in Latin America and will aid in making deliveries of weapons [Translator’s note: Available text ends here]
[Handwritten note at the bottom of the page]: “To the archive. The material is informative; used for a dossier. Desk officer of a CC CPSU sector. A. Kalinin 23.3.64.”
Pavlicek reports that Chinese representatives in Cuba have launched an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign, aimed towards all levels of the Cuban population. He mentions that many Cubans in favor of Chinese propaganda activity have expressed the opinion that China will support Cuban revolutionary activity in Latin America.
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Source
TsKhSD, f. 5, op. 49, d. 762, l. 28, r. 9128. Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.
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