First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 28, July 17, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Cuba’s pose as a “non-aligned” country has been discredited lately as numerous non-aligned nations have exposed and condemned the Cuban government’s role as an agent for the interests of the Soviet Union.
On June 21, Zaire’s President Mobutu Sese Seko declared in a nationwide speech that his country will boycott the non-aligned summit scheduled to be held in Havana next year. Mobutu denounced the destabilizing role Cuba has played in Zaire and Africa as a whole, referring to Cuba as “precisely the most aligned state among the self-styled non-aligned states in the world.”
A Cuban and Soviet-led invasion of Katangese mercenaries into Zaire was recently repelled by Zairean forces. This invasion, noted the Zaire Press Agency, violated the principles of non-aligned countries and disqualified Cuba as a non-aligned country.
Pointing out the “subservience of Cuba to the Soviet bloc,” the Zairean paper Elima called on all genuine non-aligned countries to boycott the 1979 summit in Cuba.
Besides Zaire, the Somali government recently sent a letter to members of the non-aligned movement, saying that Cuba is so obviously an agent of the Soviet Union and has so scornfully trampled upon the principles of the non-aligned movement that it cannot maintain its membership in that movement.
At the same time, the Yugoslavian government and its president, Joseph Tito, have said that Cuban interference in Ethiopia is contrary to non-alignment. Tito has called on all foreign forces to leave Ethiopia. Some 17,000 Cuban troops are now in Ethiopia, where they have been responsible for aggression against the Eritrean liberation movement as well as neighboring Somalia.
At the meeting of the non-aligned Coordination Bureau in May, Yugoslavia and other countries blocked a draft policy statement presented by Cuba which would have condemned only “imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism,” omitting reference to other forms of foreign domination. Yugoslavia insisted on restating the non-aligned countries’ basic principle of opposition to “all blocs and big powers.”
This month the non-aligned foreign ministers will meet in Belgrade to draw up draft platforms for the 1979 summit in Havana. They will have to speak to the question posed by Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko:
“How can a country like Cuba, which decidedly follows the Soviet Union, the head of the Warsaw Pact countries, be the host state of the non-aligned conference?”
How, indeed? Cuba today is a neo-colony of the Soviet Union and a Trojan horse within the movement of non-aligned countries. After the Cuban people defeated U.S. imperialism through great losses and sacrifice in 1959, the social-imperialist wolf got through the back door by hook and by crook, offering interest-free “aid” at first, and gradually converting the island into a neo-colony.
The Cuban government under Fidel Castro fell prey to this sinister bait. Eventually Cuba wound up deep in debt to a new imperialist master, tied to a one-crop economy as before, swamped in economic crisis, and locked again into the vicious circle of selling cheap and buying dear.
According to the July to issue of the U.S. News and World Report, Russian-“aid” to Cuba now totals about $6 million a day. But it is not interest-free. The USSR has lent the Castro regime altogether about $8 billion since 1959, and Cuba owes the Soviet Union over $5 billion to date, according to statistics appearing in Time and the Wall Street Journal. As a member of COMECON, the USSR-controlled economic bloc of mainly Eastern European countries, Cuba must use all the “aid” to buy Soviet products and produce at inflated prices. The prices may be as much as 53% more than prices of similar goods sold to the West. Cuba is also forced to buy all her oil and wheat from the USSR.
In addition, the USSR buys Cuban sugar at 30¢ a pound but sells it at high prices to COMECON countries. When, as in early 1976, the world-price of a pound of sugar soared to 65¢, the USSR still paid Cuba only 30¢ for its product.
Just as when Cuba was tied hand and foot to U.S. imperialism, exports once again make up a third of the country’s total production, the only difference being that they now go to the Soviet bloc. In 1976, Castro called on the Cuban people to cut down on coffee consumption, already restricted by rationing, so that more coffee could be exported. Even the island’s fish crop is mainly exported and not available for consumption.
Still the principal export, sugar, makes up 25% of the country’s gross national product and brings in 86% of the foreign exchange earnings, according to the June 26 issue of the U.S. News and World Report. The entire economy is thus oriented around sending sugar to the new czars in Moscow, just as it once revolved around U.S. market needs. Twenty years after the revolution, industry and diversification in agriculture remain at an extremely low level, although for a time after 1959 there was great progress towards diversification.
Wide-scale unemployment exists in all sectors of the economy, and by official admission, even in the largest sugar-producing provinces in the country. Because of chronic shortages, food is rationed and the people’s diet lacks variety.
The hardships of the Cuban people do not end here. Soviet domination of the political and military life of the island followed close on the heels of the economic “aid.” Cuba is now overrun with some 8,000 technicians and 2,000 military advisers from the USSR. Some estimates place the Soviet presence as high as 20,000.
The Soviets take part in every section of Cuban industry and agriculture and in most government ministries, including the Ministry of the Interior and the Cuban inteIIigence service, the OGl. The latter is closely connected to the Soviet KGB. Havana is used as a center to hatch its plots and make deals with operatives from far-flung parts of the world.
Soviet “aid” has turned the Cuban armed forces into the strongest in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States. Fifty Soviet pilots fly defense patrols for the Cuban air force, reports the July to issue of Time. Soviet ships go in and out of Cuban ports daily, and the social-imperialists use the island as a base for submarine “maneuvers” in the area.
Strategically located only 90 miles from the U.S. coast, Cuba is a fat prize in Brezhnev’s pocket, providing a convenient base of operations in the event of war against the superpower rival of the Soviets.
Right now the biggest military asset in Cuba for the new czars is that the Cuban army does their dirty work for them in their wild international rivalry with U.S. imperialism. Like a usurer demanding a pound of flesh, the USSR has forced the Cuban people to send their youth by the thousands to fight imperialist wars in Africa.
There are now more than 42,000 Cubans in 14 African nations – a full third of the Cuban armed forces, plus thousands of Cuban military advisers and “civilians”, doing paramilitary jobs. The Cuban people themselves are increasingly speaking out against the sons who never came home and the growing economic shortages resulting from the war.
The interference of Cuban mercenaries in Africa at the beck and call of the Soviet Union has further unmasked Cuba’s phony stance as “non-aligned” and as “liberators.” What are 20,000 armed Cuban troops doing in Angola still, two years after the war there ended, if not propping up a shaky pro-Soviet regime against guerrilla fighters who want a genuinely independent Angola?
By staging next year’s non-aligned conference in Havana, the USSR clearly hopes to use the “Cuban model” to trap other third world countries in its clutches. But like all imperialists, the new czars are prone to miscalculating their enemy. The non-aligned countries have identified the trap set and many are insistent on staying away from it.