Cuba and Serbia
Cuba and Serbia
A historic relation of solidarity and common purpose
In Serbia today, 83% of the population are ethnic Serbs, and 85% are Eastern Orthodox Christian. Belgrade is its capital and largest city. Its population is 6.6 million inhabitants; 8.4 million if the disputed territory of Kosovo is included.
Slavic migrations to the territory of modern-day Serbia began in the sixth century, leading to the establishment of several states. The Christianization of Serbia was a gradual process, completed by the ninth century. The Serbian Kingdom was recognized by the Holy See and Constantinople in 1217; it reached its largest territorial expansion in 1346 as the Serbian Empire.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Serbian Empire was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, which attained definitive conquest in 1459. A sector of the population was Islamized, but scholars disagree concerning whether conversion to Islam was voluntary or coerced. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, areas of central Serbia fell under Hapsburg rule, but the Ottoman Empire retook these territories, recognized in the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739.
The Serbian Revolution for independence and the movement for Slavic unity
The Serbian Revolution for independence from the Ottoman Empire broke out in 1804. It attained autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in 1830 and international recognition of independence in 1878. The First Serbian Constitution was adopted in 1835, making Serbia one of the first countries in Europe to adopt a democratic constitution. The two Balkan Wars of 1912 resulted in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Balkan League, enabling Serbia to expand its territory into adjacent regions, including Kosovo and Vardarian Macedonia.
As a result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo by a member of the Young Bosnia organization, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. The conflict escalated, with Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, and Great Britain involved in what became the First World War. The Central Powers overpowered Serbia, which was occupied by Austria-Hungary from 1915 to 1918. Serbia was liberated by the Serb army in 1918, establishing Serbia as a major power in the Balkans.
An agreement to form a common South Slavic state was signed on the island of Corfu in 1917. The states of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia were among the parties to the agreement. The Kingdoms of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was declared on November 24, 1918, under King Peter I of Serbia, who was succeeded by his son, Alexander, in August 1921. The Kingdom was characterized by conflict between Serb centralists and Croat autonomists; governments headed by prime ministers were weak and short-lived. In 1929, Alexander established a dictatorship with the intention of forging Yugoslav ideology and a single Yugoslav nation, and he changed the name of the country to Yugoslavia. This resulted in the further alienation of non-Serbs living in Yugoslavia. When Alexander was assassinated in 1934, he was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son, Peter II, and a regency council. A 1939 agreement established Croatia as an autonomous region within Yugoslavia.
When the Axis powers invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, the territory was divided and recognized as pertaining to Hungary, Bulgaria, the Independent State of Croatia, Greater Albania and Montenegro. The remaining part of occupied Serbia was placed under the military administration of Nazi Germany, ruled by Serbian puppet governments with the assistance of the Yugoslav National Movement, a fascist organization.
Royalists commanded by Draža Mihailović and communist partisans commanded by Josip Broz Tito forged a resistance movement against the puppet governments controlled by Germany. Massacres of Serbs, Jews, and the Roma people by German forces and Hungarian fascists during the period have been widely reported. Serbs formed the vast majority of the anti-fascist fighters and the Yugoslav Partisans during the World War II occupation. By late 1944, the Partisans had taken control of Yugoslavia.
The post-World War II de facto control of Yugoslavia by the communist partisans directed by Tito resulted in the abolition of the monarchy and a constitutional referendum. The Socialist Republic of Serbia was established as a constituent republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Tito was one of four influential politicians during the period, which included the hosting in 1961 of the founding meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of Third World states dedicated to the creation of Third World unity against surviving colonial global economic structures and the imperialist policies of the Western powers.
The break-up of Yugoslavia
In the late 1960s, pro-decentralization reformers were able to attain the decentralization of powers and establish substantial autonomy in Kosovo, and well as recognition of a distinctive “Muslim” nationality. The reforms led to the firing of Serbs on a large scale and to Albanian ethnic domination of institutions in Kosovo.
In 1989, Slobodan Milošević rose to power in Serbia on the basis of a promise to reduce the powers of the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, where his pro-centralization allies also rose to power. This led to reaction, which took the form of awakened ethnic nationalism across Yugoslavia, resulting in its breakup. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia declared independence during 1991 and 1992. Serbia and Montenegro remained together as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Civil wars emerged in the newly declared independent states of the former Yugoslavia in the period 1991 to 2001, particularly in Croatia and Bosnia, where large ethnic Serb populations did not support independence from Yugoslavia. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was not one of the parties directly involved in the civil wars of the newly declared independent states, but it provided—according to the opponents of centralization—logistic, military, and financial support to Serb forces in the civil wars. In response, the United Nations imposed sanctions against Yugoslavia, which led to its political isolation and the collapse of its economy from 1990 to 1993, with its GDP decreasing from $24 billion to $10 billion in the period.
In 1998 and 1999, there were continued clashes in the province of Kosovo between the Kosovo Liberation Army, an Albanian guerilla force, and Yugoslav security forces. NATO intervened with a massive bombing campaign, which was initiated on March 24, 1999, and which resulted in a withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the establishment of UN administration of the province.
In 2003, in Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky exposes the false claims of the Western media and academics with respect to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He notes that the standard media line, constantly repeated, was that the NATO bombing was in response to an ethnic cleansing campaign launched by the Serb forces against the Albanian population, forcing more than half of the Albanian population into exile. According to this narrative, the exiled Albanians was able to return following the NATO bombing, which therefore ought to be understood an altruistic intervention for the benefit of the people of the region.
Chomsky notes, however, that such claims of humanitarian intervention had no relation to the facts. Ethnic cleansing and atrocities occurred after the bombing, not before, and indeed, they were anticipated by the West as a likely response in retaliation for the bombing, as is made clear by then-NATO commander Wesley Clark in his memoirs. Clark also makes evident the motive behind the NATO bombing campaign, which was not Milošević’s alleged human rights violations, but the need to impose NATO’s will on a defiant leader, whose defiance was undermining the credibility of American and European willpower.
In summary, then, we see that Serbia was the center of a historic anti-imperialist movement against the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. Serbia also was the center of a movement for Slavic unity and for socialism as the best defense against foreign imperialist domination. The more recent imperialist powers in the territory, Germany and the United States, have favored the decentralization and the fragmentation of the territory into political and geographical segments, thus facilitating foreign imperialist penetration. This reactionary imperialist push for fragmentation has been a general tendency of modern imperialisms in all regions of the world. At the same time, the movement for Slavic unification in defense of national liberation could not be fully attained in practice, because of disunifying ethnic identifications, in spite of the gains of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Tito period.
Cuba expresses solidarity with Serbia and Yugoslavia
On October 1, 2007, Fidel published in the Cuban daily newspaper Granma reflections entitled “The illegal wars of the empire.” The article includes extensive citations of a Declaration of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs of March 26, 1999, published in Granma with the title “Cuba calls for ending the unjustified NATO aggression against Yugoslavia.”
The Declaration asserts: “After a number of painful and highly manipulated events, prolonged armed confrontations, and secret negotiations with respect to the Kosovo question, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has launched its announced brutal attack against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose people were the most heroic of those that struggled against the Nazi hordes in the Second World War.” It notes that this bellicose action was conceived by its authors as “punishment of the Yugoslavian government.”
The Declaration comments:
“The war launched by NATO revives the just fears of humanity for the formation of an insulting unipolarism, ruled by a warlike empire that has established itself as a world police force. . . . It is worth asking if the use and abuse of force will resolve the problems of the world and will defend the human rights of the innocent persons that today die from the missiles and bombs that are falling upon a small country of that cultured and civilized Europe. . . . The Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Republic of Cuba strongly condemns the aggression of NATO against Yugoslavia, led by the United States. . . . In this moment of suffering and pain for the peoples of Yugoslavia, Cuba calls upon the international community to mobilize its efforts to put immediate end to this unjustified aggression, which would permit the nation to retake the peaceful road of negotiation for the solution of its internal problems, a matter that depends only and exclusively on the sovereign will and free determination of the Yugoslavian peoples. . . . The ridiculous intention of imposing solutions by means of force is incompatible with all civilized reasoning and the essential principles of international law.”
In the October 1, 2007 article, Fidel noted that, in response to these facts, he had sent a message to Yugoslavian President Milošević through the Ambassador of Yugoslavia in Havana. The message, dated March 25, 1999, stated:
“After analyzing carefully all that is occurring and the origins of the present and dangerous conflict, our point of view is that a great crime against the Serbian people is being committed, which is also a great error of the aggressors that cannot be sustained, if the Serbian people, as in its heroic struggle against the Nazi hordes, is capable of resisting.
“If the brutal and unjust attack in the heart of Europe does not cease, the world reaction will be even greater and much more rapid that what was let loose by the war in Vietnam. As in no other occasion in recent times, powerful forces and world interests are aware that such conduct in international relations cannot continue.
“Although I do not have a personal relation with the conflict, I have meditated much over the problems of the present world, and I believe that I have a sense of history, a concept of the tactics and strategies in a struggle between a small country and a great superpower, and I feel a profound hatred toward injustice, because of which I dare to transmit to you an idea in three words: ‘Resist, resist, and resist.’”
Milošević sent a response to Fidel on March 30, 1999.
“I received your message of March 25, 1999, with attention and sincere appreciation. Thank you for your strong words of support and stimulation for Yugoslavia, and also for the condemnation of the NATO aggression expressed by Cuba and its representatives, especially in the forums of the United Nations. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is exposed to an aggression by the United States and NATO, the greatest in the world since the times of the aggressions of Hitler. A crime has been committed not only against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a peaceful, sovereign, and independent State, but also against all that is valued in the world at the beginning of the XXI century: the United Nations system, the Non-Aligned Movement, the legal bases for order, human rights, and civilization in general. I feel proud to be able to communicate to you that the aggression has only unified and strengthened the determination of the peoples of Yugoslavia to resist and to defend our freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. Our armed forces and the people are determined and disposed to fulfil their duty. Therefore, for us the solidarity and support of friends in all the world is welcome and necessary, in the widest and strongest form possible.
“The comportment of the UN Security Council with respect to the aggression of NATO against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is a step backwards for the United Nations. It is a very bad sign and a great warning for all the world, especially for the small and middle-sized countries, although not only for them. I am sure that you know that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Serbian Republic continuously and sincerely strive for a political solution for Kosovo and Metohja in the interest of all the national communities that live there and that respect our constitutional order. I appeal to you, Mr. President, to continue the friendship of Cuba with action in the breast of the Non-Alignment Movement in order to convoke the Bureau of Coordination of the Movement and the group of friends, in order that they resolutely condemn the aggression of NATO against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I am convinced also that your personal prestige would be of great usefulness for stimulating the countries of Central and South America as well as the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement in general to lift their voice in a strong condemnation of this mindlessly destructive aggression. Once again, with gratefulness for your solidarity and support for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, I express the hope that we will remain in close contact. Receive, Mr. President, my expression of the most profound respect.
Milošević was removed from power in 2000, in what we would call today a Western-fabricated “color revolution.” Thus, Fidel’s projections for world condemnation turned out not to be true. Nonetheless, with the enduring faith in the future of humanity that is a fundamental characteristic of the virtuous servants of God, Fidel reissued these 1999 declarations and messages in 2007. I submit that the worldwide anti-imperialist revolution is more advanced than ever, and that consciousness of the great crime against the Serbian people will emerge, and a new norm guiding the conduct of states in international affairs will be established.
Contemporary period
In 2006, Montenegro decided in popular referendum (with 55% support) to end its union with Serbia. This was followed by a declaration of the independence of Serbia by the National Assembly of Serbia. Thus, the union between Serbia and Montenegro was dissolved.
In 2008, the Assembly of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Talks with respect of the status of Kosovo are held between Serbia and Kosovo-Albanian authorities, mediated by the European Union.
The current constitution of Serbia was adopted in 2006, following the dissolution of the union between Serbia and Montenegro. The constitution names the President of the Republic as the head of state, elected by popular vote to five-year terms, with a maximum of two terms. Aleksandar Vučić of the Serbian Progressive Party is the current president, elected in the 2017 presidential elections.
The 2006 constitution of Serbia also establishes the National Assembly as a unicameral legislative body with strong powers, including the power to enact laws, select and dismiss the Prime Minister and other ministers, declare war, and ratify international treaties. It is composed of 250 proportionally elected members who serve four-year terms. As a result of the 2020 parliamentary elections, the Serbian Progressive Party and the Socialist Party of Serbia are the two largest parties, which hold along with their coalition partners a supermajority in the National Assembly. Serbia is the fifth ranking country in Europe with respect to the number of women holding high public office.
The renewal of the relation of solidarity between Serbia and Cuba
Serbia was the third stop of a European tour by Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel, which included previous visits to Italy and the Vatican, and a subsequent visit France for the Summit on a New International Financial Order. The Cuban delegation included the life partner of the president, Lis Cuesta Peraza, as well as the Cuban Minister of Foreign Relations, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla. The Cuban government announced that the purpose of the visit is to contribute to the consolidation of the ties between Cuban and Serbia, which have maintained diplomatic relations since November 4, 1902.
In declarations to the press on June 21, the Cuban President expressed his appreciation for the warm and affectionate reception that the Cuban delegation has received from many persons in Serbia. He declared that the warm reception of the Cuban delegation says a great deal about the historic ties that exist between the two peoples, that were founded on the friendship between el comandante Fidel and General Tito. It is a historic relation that recently has been found again, Díaz-Canel declared, marked by the visit of the current Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, to Cuba in 2017.
With reference to the interchange between the Cuban delegation and the Serbian President and Cabinet, Díaz-Canel noted that both parties have affirmed the will to continue strengthening the historic ties of friendship and cooperation between the two peoples and to elevate the ties in the commercial and economic planes as well as investment. Díaz-Canel considered that it would be good to increase visits to Cuba of governmental, business, scientific, cultural, academic, and sports delegations, including frequent visits by President Vučić. The Cuban president pointed out the need to increase interchange in areas of common interest, such as agriculture, biotechnology, culture, sport, education, health, and tourism. He noted that a Cuban Vice-Prime Minister is going to participate in a mixed intergovernmental commission that has been established between Cuba and Serbia, in order to give the commission more weight and systematization.
Díaz-Canel recognized that “our countries have had the bitter experience for decades of the noxious effects of unilateral sanctions, a practice that we reject in the most energetic terms.” He expressed thanks to President Vučić for the continuous support of Cuba’s just demand for the end of the blockade and for the aid of the Serbian government provided to Cuba following Hurricane Ian in 2022. The Cuban President reaffirmed Cuban support for respect for the territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia and its right to sovereignty over all its territory.
Díaz-Canel noted that a special moment in the interchange between the two delegations was remembrance of the visits of Fidel in 1976 and in 1986 to the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. And remembrance of the visits of President Tomislav Nikolic to Havana in 2015 and President Aleksandar Vučić in 2017, which included sustained interchanges with Raúl.
In his declarations to the press, Serbian President Vučić declared that the Serbian people love the Cuban people; that there is no country that enjoys as much popularity among Serbs as Cuba. He noted that Serbia has an interest in cooperating with Cuba in various fields, in including health and agriculture. Serbia is self-sufficient in the production of corn and wheat, with surplus production in these crops, so that Serbia would be able to provide aid to Cuba. In addition, there are possibilities for mutually beneficial collaboration in innovative projects in biotechnology and technology. Tourism is also a field where ties could be increased, because Serbs have great interest in Cuba. Vučić also observed that Serbia has much to share with Cuba in the field of politics and society, since both countries have sustained their struggles for sovereignty and independence, in spite of international pressure.
President Vučić asked Díaz-Canel to convey to the Cuban people his friendly and fraternal regards, knowing that in the heart of Europe there is a people that supports them.
The Cuban delegation visited the Tomb of the Serbian Unknown Soldier in Avala Mountain, on the outskirts of the city of Belgrade, at its most elevated point. Díaz-Canel wrote in the Memory Book of the Monument: “In Avala Mountain, before the Monument of the Unknown Soldier, we render tribute, in the name of the Cuban people and government, to the fallen combatants in defense of the peace and freedom of the Serbian people. Their example of resistance is a source of inspiration in the struggle of the peoples for independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the right of self-determination.”
Conclusion
With consciousness of the historic struggle of the Serbian people against foreign imperialism, we are able to appreciate the reasons why Tito was a central figure in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. Although Yugoslavia was the only Eastern European nation to join the Non-Aligned Movement, it was far from being the only Eastern European nation that was conquered and politically controlled by larger European powers. At that historic moment of the 1960s, many Eastern European nations lacked the exceptional leadership that Tito provided, involving the education of the people toward consciousness of the need for united struggle against domination by the great powers.
The story of Serbia and Yugoslavia teaches us that a colonial model that stresses Western European and U.S. imperialist domination of the peoples of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, although in essence true, does not provide a complete portrait of the modern era. The domination and brutal treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe by the great powers, justified with racist ideologies, is part of the modern story. Indeed, it was an important factor driving their migration in massive numbers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the United States, where the erasure of their national consciousnesses, cultures, and languages was a precondition for economic opportunity.
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