Putin and Castro

Date: Saturday, April 15, 2006 10:13:33 AM EST By MARK N. KATZ

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.

-- (Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George
Mason University.)

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