You often hear opponents of U.S. sanctions against the Castro dictatorship say the policy is a relic of the Cold War that no longer exists, but none of them mention the Cuban regime is still fighting it.
An Op-Ed by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro in The Washington Times:
New concessions in Cuba-Russia alliance show how little has changed since Cold War
Last week, reports surfaced that the Cuban regime is sending troops to train in Belarus to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
The revelation comes just days after Cuban Interior Minister Lazaro Alvarez Casas went to Moscow to meet with Russian Security Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, who was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2018 for “serious human rights violations” under the Magnitsky Act. The two countries met at the 11th International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues, during which they entered a cooperative security agreement.
A longtime ally of the Kremlin, Cuban military personnel are familiar with Russian weaponry and should be useful in training pro-Moscow forces counteracting the West’s efforts to protect Ukraine. While Cuba’s gesture is a clear act of hostility against U.S. efforts to support its allies, Havana-Moscow cooperation should come as no surprise, considering how little has changed since the Cold War despite propaganda from Cuba that suggests otherwise.
The reality is that Cuba has engaged in systematic and continuous collaboration with Russia since Fidel Castro began to form an alliance with Nikita Khrushchev’s USSR shortly after coming to power. While Moscow may have changed its Marxist-Leninist political identity with the collapse of the Soviet Union, its political aims have remained the same, as evidenced by Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and hostilities against other former Soviet satellite countries.
Unfortunately, Russia’s interest in advancing its influence is not limited to Eurasia. Its determination to influence the Western Hemisphere goes to the heart of the long-running Cuba-Russia relationship. With Cuba’s help, Moscow has dominated the information warfare field all over Central and South America, transmitting three times as much government-sponsored news content as Voice of America and her sister networks do. While the U.S. has focused on Eurasia, President Ronald Reagan’s prediction about the dominoes falling in Latin America is being borne out as regional economic powers such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico have voted out their free-market leaders in favor of socialist ones.
“In the span of five months, seven Kremlin officials have visited Cuba,” wrote Alvaro Alba of the U.S. government’s Cuba broadcasting network, Radio and Television Martí. “In March, the CEO of the state-owned oil company Rosneft, Igor Sechin, and the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Patrushev, were in Havana. One month later, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the President of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, who had also been in Cuba in February 2022, days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, visited the island. And now in May, the Russian presidential advisor, Maxim Oreshkin, the President of the Cuba-Russia Business Council, Boris Titov, and the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Chernishenko, have visited Cuba. No other Third World country has had so many Russians visit in such a short period of time.”
The purpose of these visits was to escalate economic and military cooperation between the two countries, placing the U.S. and her allies at greater risk. In January 2022, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov teased the idea of potential Russian military deployments to Cuba and Venezuela if the U.S. supported Ukraine or NATO accepted more European members. Russian military deployments to Cuba are not altogether unlikely since Havana is getting unprecedented access to the Kremlin.
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