Alexandr Ivanovich Alexeyev

Alexandr Ivanovich Alexeyev (Russian: Александр Иванович Алексеев, born Alexandr Ivanovich Shitov (Шитов); 1 August 1913 – 1989) was a Soviet intelligence agent who posed first as a journalist and later a diplomat. His arrival in Havana on 1 October 1959 inaugurated a new era in Soviet-Cuban relations. Alexeyev was later appointed as the Soviet Ambassador to Cuba, and played a vital role in easing tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Alexeyev graduated from the faculty of history of the Moscow State University and in the late 1930s took part in the Spanish Civil War as an interpreter. From 1941 he worked as a diplomat and intelligence officer, first in Iran (1941) and then in France (1944–1951).

Between 1954 and 1958 Alexeyev served as the first secretary of the Russian Embassy in Argentina. As events began to take shape in Cuba, the Soviet leadership realized that it lacked any meaningful tactical information on the new Cuban government. The Soviet press had hitherto used words such as "uprising," "rebellion," or "guerrilla war" to describe Castro's 26th of July Movement. Only in 1958 did the press begin using the phrase "national liberation" to describe Castro's movement, although there is speculation that this shift was more in response to the United States' support for Fulgencio Batista than due to a real awareness of Castro's political goals.Nikita Khrushchev himself wrote later in his memoirs that he "had no idea what political course [Fidel Castro's] regime would follow." In an interview, Alexeyev admitted that, despite having a considerable background in Latin America, he himself didn't know much about the nature of the Cuban Revolution. "In Latin America," he said, "there have been a lot of revolutions, so we thought that it was just a normal Latin American revolution." Some historians have argued that Khrushchev was eager to embrace the new Cuban government in an attempt to reassert Soviet preeminence in the communist world, since the divisions between the USSR and Maoist China had come to a head by 1959.

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