WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- At a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be cozying up to anti-American rulers such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, Bashar Assad in Syria, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it is highly remarkable that he does not have close relations with Cuba's Fidel Castro who remains as anti-American as ever. If anything, Russian-Cuban relations have gotten worse since Putin came to power at the end of 1999. Why is this?
Russian-Cuban relations had been strained before Putin. Castro deeply resented the cutoff in aid from Moscow undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev and not reversed by Boris Yeltsin. Moscow, for its part, was unhappy that Cuba had not yet agreed to repay any of the debt Havana owed it from the Soviet era (estimated by Russian sources as being $11-20 billion). The Russians, though, continued to use -- and publicly value -- the Lourdes electronic monitoring facility in Cuba for eavesdropping on American telecommunications.
However, Russian-Cuban relations appeared set to revive during 2000 -- Putin's first year in office. That summer, Moscow rejected the U.S. Congress's efforts to link American approval for the restructuring of Russia's Soviet-era debt repayment through the Paris Club to the closure of the Lourdes facility. Amidst a burst of actions from late 2000 through mid-2001 designed to show Russia's independence from and defiance of Washington (including the unilateral cancellation of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement limiting Russian transfers of military and nuclear technology to Iran, playing host to Iranian President Mohammed Khatami in Moscow, and signing a treaty of friendship with Beijing), Putin visited Havana in December 2000. While there, he extended a $50 million credit to Cuba and paid a visit to the Lourdes facility, thus indicating a desire to retain it.
This visit, however, ended up souring Russian-Cuban relations. Putin pressed Castro on the debt issue and called for it to be handled through the Paris Club. This signaled Moscow's willingness to write off a substantial amount of the debt, but insistence that the remaining balance definitely be repaid. For its part, Cuba refused to work through the Paris Club and even claimed that it owed nothing to Moscow. Castro instead demanded that Moscow pay Cuba $200 million annually for use of the Lourdes facility. Further, he insisted that this sum actually be paid and not merely offset against what Moscow thought Havana owed it.
In October 2001, Putin announced that Russia would close the intelligence gathering station in Lourdes. Some saw this move as a gesture of support for the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. According to one Russian press account, however, Putin decided to close the Lourdes facility immediately after his December 2000 visit to Cuba. The Cuban government was very upset by this announcement, but by January 2002, the Lourdes facility had ceased operations.
Since then, and despite their continued criticism of various aspects of American foreign policy, Russian-Cuban relations have remained stagnant. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with Castro in Havana in September 2004, primarily to talk about trade and economic issues. A Russian press report about this meeting indicated that Castro "is on good terms with only a few leaders."
The debt issue seems to have loomed large in Putin's decision to downgrade relations with Cuba. There have, however, been other governments (such as Syria and Iraq -- both before and after the fall of Saddam) that have also shown little inclination to repay their Soviet-era debts to Moscow, but with which Putin has actively sought to maintain good relations. The difference between them and Cuba is that these other governments have at least acknowledged that they owe a debt to Moscow, and present lucrative opportunities for Russian business even if these debts are largely written off (as has occurred now with both Syria and post-Saddam Iraq). Cuba, by contrast, simply does not present the potential for profitability that Putin seeks in partnerships with other nations.
Despite these differences, many Russians -- including the foreign policy and intelligence "elites" -- strongly objected to Putin's closure of the Lourdes facility back in 2001-02. They argued that the $200 million annual rent Castro wanted would have been worth paying even if Cuba did not repay the Soviet-era debt, and that closing Lourdes after Washington had called upon it to do so gave the appearance of Russia knuckling under to American pressure. Putin's defenders argued that a richer intelligence yield would be derived from spending the $200 million per year on spy satellites than on Lourdes, and that American preferences had not influenced the Russian president's decision.
I have no idea whether the claim that Moscow would be better off spending the money on spy satellites rather than Lourdes is true or not. But given Putin's sensitivity to anything relating to Russia's prestige and image in the world, it seems that something more than a simple cost-benefit analysis over how best to spend $200 million per year in the intelligence budget could have motivated him to make a decision that was extremely unpopular with the Russian public at the time for making Moscow look weak. While Putin did not want to be seen knuckling under to Washington, he may have felt even more averse to actually knuckling under to Havana. Underlying all this appears to have been an assessment by Putin that Castro and Cuba were simply not worth $200 million per year to Russia.
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(Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University.)
