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In this episode, part 8 of our ongoing Cuba series, we're joined again by Helen Yaffe for a conversation exploring the lessons Cuba learned from the crisis brought on by the fall of the USSR—known as Cuba's "special period". Helen Yaffe is a professor of Latin American political economy at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, and Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. She is also the cohost of the Cuba Analysis podcast and the documentary "Cuba's life task: combatting climate change."

Our conversation begins with an introduction to Cuba's "special period", the period of economic crisis in Cuba which occurred as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Helen gives us some context on how closely entwined Cuba's economy was to its primary trading partner, the Soviet Union, before describing how this partnership was impacted in 1991 and what this meant for Cuba more broadly.

Before we discuss the ways that Cuba adapted to the loss of the USSR, we discuss how the United States took advantage of the crisis in 1991 to strengthen sanctions through mechanisms like the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act while also engaging in outright terrorism out of Miami—including the "Brothers to the Rescue" incident (and the CIA-trained terrorist network within which it was situated) that serves as the pretext for the Trump administration's recent indictment of Raúl Castro.

Helen then goes on to describe in more detail the impacts on Cuba of the fall of the USSR and takes some time to talk about how Cubans adapted in the midst of this crisis, drawing from both her scholarly work and also from her experience living in Cuba during this period. We end by discussing the Cuban medical brigades and how this program adapted in the post-Soviet era, particularly in shaping Cuba's relationship with many states in Latin America and reshaping its own economy, before drawing lessons for the current crisis facing Cuba.

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