The Moscow Connection

While Fidel Castro has his own reasons for sending Cubans to Africa, he could not do so without huge and constant transfusions of Soviet aid. Western experts estimate that Russia now pumps the equivalent of about $6 million a day into Cuba. That figure includes outright grants, subsidies and technical aid. The U.S.S.R. sells Cuba 190,000 bbl. of oil per day at about half the world price and buys 3.5 million tons per year of Cuban sugar at four times the world price (currently 7-c- per lb.), paying partly with what Cuba needs most: hard currency.

Cuba also gets virtually all of its formidable military arsenal free from the Soviet Union. Fifty Soviet pilots are flying defense patrols for the Cuban air force. Soviet technicians are everywhere; there are more than 400 at one nickel mining and processing facility in eastern Cuba. Teams of Russian electrical specialists have fanned out around the countryside to erect high-tension wires as part of a new nationwide power grid. The Russians are involved in every section of Cuban industry and agriculture and most government ministries, notably including the Ministry of Interior and its espionage branch, the DGI (General Directorate of Intelligence), which works hand in glove with the Soviet KGB.

The Soviets make a point of appearing to keep away from MINREX, the Ministry of External Relations, as the Cuban State Department is called. Both Moscow and Havana want to generate the impression that Castro calls his own shots in foreign policy.

The Russian ambassador, Nikita Tolubeyev, is a member of the Soviet Central Committee and dean of the diplomatic corps, but he is certainly no high commissioner. He is generally regarded by Cuban and foreign contacts alike as a mostly ornamental, rather ineffectual apparatchik and errand boy. In fact, Tolubeyev has complained to his home office that he has difficulty getting access to Fidel. One reason may be that after more than seven years in Havana, Tolubeyev has yet to learn more than a smattering of Spanish. When Fidel wants to coordinate his signals with the Kremlin, he does so by dispatching to Moscow his brother, Defense Minister Raul, or Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, his principal foreign policy adviser. Rodriguez visited Moscow six times last year and huddled with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at the United Nations in May.

The large Soviet presence in Cuba --approximately 8,000 civilians and 2,000 military advisers--is more tolerated than welcomed by most Cubans.

Privately, Havanans complain that the Soviets tend to behave boorishly. They live in luxury apartments and hotels, many of which were built with American Mafia money in the '50s, and they venture out into the city in busloads to storm the few stores where there is anything to buy. The Russians also have a reputation for showing ill-disguised contempt toward Cuba's large black and mulatto population. At a May 5 town meeting in Spokane, Wash., President Carter commented that Soviet adventurism in Africa is doomed to fail because of the Russians' "innate racism." Says one Cuban pointedly: "I object to Carter's use of the word 'innate'."

However unsavory the Cubans may find the Russians as people, they regard them as indispensable allies. The central fact of Cuban economic life is the 16-year-old U.S. trade embargo, or "blockade," as the Cubans call it. One of the political realities that make Castro's brand of totalitarianism easier for the Cubans to accept is the looming hostility of Cuba's giant neighbor to the north.

As long as Russia keeps the island economically afloat and helps man its defenses, Moscow will have infinitely more influence than Washington on Castro's policy in Africa--or anywhere else.

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