Coping with the Soviets' Cuban Brigade

By Strobe Talbott

September 1979 may well go down in diplomatic history as the month that the U.S. Government went a little bit haywire. Both the Executive and Legislative branches have overreacted to the belated discovery of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba and have severely jeopardized rational consideration of the SALT II treaty. The events of the past four weeks provide a case study in the breakdown of constitutional process whereby the Administration and Congress are supposed to be partners in statesmanship.

The intelligence community, finally recovered from its obsession with Cuba of the 1960s, had recently consigned the island to its peripheral vision and focused instead on what seemed more important tasks, like monitoring the tests of new Soviet intercontinental missiles. Then, re-examining evidence that it had been sitting on for a long time, the CIA changed its opinion about the exact nature of Soviet military manpower in Cuba.

Contrary to assurances that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had already given the Senate, the agency concluded that about one-third of the 6,000 to 9,000 Russians on duty in Cuba are combat troops rather than advisers and technicians.

What upset the intelligence analysts was not that they had exposed some new and perfidious Soviet menace but that they had failed to notice a brigade that had been there for years. What upset the Carter Administration was not the intelligence failure but an acute political problem. Vance had inadvertently misled the Senate.

So the Administration decided to seize the initiative in the inevitable controversy.

Rather than let Senator Henry Jackson exploit the issue to scuttle SALT or Senator Howard Baker to ingratiate himself with the Republican right, the Administration would give a senatorial ally, Idaho's Frank Church, a sneak preview of the information and thus offer him an opportunity to go public with it. That way, he might be a principal arbiter of an acceptable Soviet explanation for the brigade. But Church, facing tough conservative opposition to his reelection next year, panicked. The Senate would not ratify SALT, he proclaimed, until the Soviet brigade had been removed.

No way will the Soviets oblige. They are notoriously loath to let U.S. Senators beat them with sticks, no matter what the carrots. In 1974 the Kremlin made clear that it would rather live without most-favored-nation status than submit to "Scoop" Jackson's condition of increased emigration of Jews. Soviet sensitivities are a matter not only of international pride but also of intramural Kremlin politics. Nikita Khrushchev lost his job partly because the Kennedy Administration forced him to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1962.

Almost everyone acknowledges that the Soviet brigade does not violate the 1962 Soviet-American agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis. Nor does it come anywhere near as close to straining the spirit of that agreement as did the berthing of Russian atomic submarines in Cuba in 1970 (see Kissinger: White House Years) or the stationing of MiG-23s on the island in 1978.* Nor is the brigade plausibly a strike force for an assault on Guatemala or Key West. Nor did it arrive recently enough to be a deliberate, mischievous test of Jimmy Carter's will. Nor does it have anything to do with the issues in SALT.

Henry Kissinger and some Senators have urged linking ratification of the treaty with a significant boost in the U.S. military budget to offset increased Soviet arms spending of the past five years. That is a creditable argument, since SALT must enhance U.S. defenses as well as help control arms. But there are no grounds for linking SALT to the Soviet brigade in Cuba. The Soviets say the unit has been there for 17 years, and U.S. intelligence sources concede it has been there for at least ten, so the brigade is not even symbolically part of the global Soviet buildup. A number of critics have argued for a kind of punitive linkage -- withholding SALT if the Soviets misbehave around the world. But it is hardly logical to "punish" the U.S.S.R. for having not quite 3,000 soldiers in Cuba by allowing it to have an extra 3,000 nuclear warheads, the number that the Soviets could add to their intercontinental missiles unless the lower SALT II ceilings are adopted.

Of course Cuba is a fortress, and of course it is reinforced by the Soviets. It has been so for decades. There is legitimate, longstanding concern over the island's use as a training ground for Soviet-Cuban adventures in the Third World, including the Caribbean. But Castro's reprehensible conduct as a global mischief-maker bedeviled American foreign policy long before the ratification of SALT II or the re-election of Frank Church was an issue. Cuba's predatory military probably will continue to be a problem for a long time to come -- until the U.S. recovers some measure of leverage on Cuba, possibly by restoring trade and diplomatic relations and thereby beginning the difficult process of prying Cuba out of the Soviet bear hug.

Even Cyrus Vance, in his attempt to pre-empt his critics, has called the presence of the brigade "a very serious matter" and said that the Administration "will not be satisfied with the status quo." Thus Vance contributed to the misimpression that the Soviet military presence in Cuba has been steadily and ominously growing.

In fact, that presence seems to have remained fairly steady since the mid-1960s -- as has the U.S. military presence in Cuba, in the form of the large U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.

Now the issue has moved into intensive, private negotiations between Vance and Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin. Vance must persuade the Kremlin to alter the status quo so that the Ad ministration can climb out of its hole -- and Frank Church can climb out of an even deeper one. If Vance succeeds, and the Russians agree to tinker with the command structure, deployment and definition of the brigade, then Americans will have to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that in the overblown Cuban crisis of September 1979, Soviet flexibility rescued the U.S. Government from its own clumsiness. If Vance fails, there is a good chance that a sensible debate on the merits of the SALT treaty, will be impossible. The treaty might well have to be shelved until the silly season of the 1980 elections is over.

Whatever the outcome, the Cuban affair not only casts still more doubt on the leadership of the Carter Administration but also raises a longer-term and more disturbing question about whether the Congress -- recently so assertive about playing a bigger role in foreign policy -- can help solve crises rather than manufacturing and aggravating them.

-- Strobe Talbott

* After U.S. protests, the subs were pulled out, and U.S. intelligence confirmed that the MiGs were not rigged to carry nuclear weapons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.