This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

In the search for a Cuban road to socialism, those advocating a gradualist and pragmatic approach clashed with Che Guevara and his supporters, who called for a radical and voluntarist development strategy. While criticized by Cuba’s Soviet and Eastern Bloc allies, Che’s radical economic ideas, which dominated Cuban policy by 1968, were shaped by North Korea’s example as well as its material support. North Korea appeared to show a tested path through which a small country emerging from colonialism and underdevelopment could transform rapidly into a modern, industrialized, socialist republic. The Cuban–North Korean ideological encounter reflected a broader discourse taking place within the international Left at the time reflecting disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the appeal of alternative models of socialism from the global South. As an ideological consensus between Cuba and North Korea solidified in the 1960s, the two governments became principal defenders of voluntarist economics within the socialist world, in resistance to the dominant trend towards “market socialism.” This partnership was given its most vibrant expression in the 1970 sugar harvest, Cuba’s pivotal experiment in voluntarist economics, in which North Korea participated directly.

By early 1965, new dynamics were taking shape within the international communist movement. Cuba and North Korea were at the forefront of this challenge. Relations between the two countries date back to the Korean War, when many Cubans, like young people across Latin America, mobilized to prevent their countries from joining the US-led war effort. When the Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought the island into the socialist camp, a bond began to grow between the Cuban and North Korean leaderships reflective of their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, and their common interests as small countries within a community of socialist states dominated by the Soviet Union and China. Political, cultural, and economic cooperation between Havana and Pyongyang grew steadily, including Che’s historic visit to North Korea in December 1960. By 1965, a nascent Third Worldist tendency affirming its independence from the two major socialist powers was coalescing around North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam. At its core was the conviction that it was those on the frontlines of the anti-imperialist struggle which most clearly recognized the true historic task at hand: the defeat of US imperialism.