The North Korea-Cuba Connection

The North Korea-Cuba Connection
Havana's continued cooperation with Pyongyang is an alarming blow to the
normalization process.
By Samuel Ramani
June 07, 2016

On May 24, 2016, the Korea Times reported that senior officials from
North Korea's governing Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and the Communist
Party of Cuba held talks on strengthening ties between Pyongyang and
Havana. This meeting followed Cuba's congratulatory rhetoric toward Kim
Jong-un after his re-election during last month's historic Workers'
Party Congress. That congress was the first such-meeting since 1980.

While relations between North Korea and Cuba have been close since the
Cold War, this revelation is an embarrassing blow to the Obama
administration's attempts to normalize relations with Cuba. North
Korea's close ties to Cuba can be explained by a shared normative
solidarity against American values and perceived American imperialism.
This ideological bond is formed out of historical experience and has
occasionally manifested itself in symbolically significant shipments of
arms and manufactured goods. These trade linkages persist to this day,
despite tightened UN sanctions and strides towards a less
confrontational U.S.-Cuba relationship.

North Korea and Cuba: A Cold War-Born Ideological Alliance

Over the past half-century, Cuba has been one of North Korea's most
consistent international allies. This alliance has caused Havana to
resist diplomatically recognizing South Korea, despite growing economic
cooperation with Seoul. Cuba's firm pro-Pyongyang stance has deep
ideological underpinnings, stemming from both countries' shared
Communist experiences. In 1960, Che Guevara visited North Korea,
praising Kim Il-sung's regime as a model for Fidel Castro's Cuba to follow.

While both regimes preserved authoritarian systems and the trappings of
a planned economy, their ideological synergy did not translate into
convergent governance trajectories, as Guevara predicted. As Wilson
Center expert James Person argued in a July 2013 BBC article, North
Korea wanted to avoid Cuba's dependency on Soviet weaponry following
Khrushchev's retreat from confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This resulted in North Korea transitioning toward a military-first
policy, to the detriment of the country's economic development.
Meanwhile, despite visiting North Korea in 1986, Fidel Castro avoided
creating a cult of personality resembling Pyongyang's, as he felt that
statues erected in his honor were incompatible with the Soviet
Marxist-Leninist principles that he adhered to.

Despite their divergent development courses, both countries have
remained close allies to this day, and there are signs that the
bilateral relationship has strengthened further under Raul Castro's
rule. Panama's interception of a North Korean ship in 2013 containing
Cuban arms concealed under bags of sugar represented the most
significant Havana-Pyongyang commercial linkage since the 1980s. Despite
Cuban attempts to downplay the controversy, Panama's foreign minister
regarded this action as just part of a much larger Cuba-North Korea arms
deal. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, also
condemned Cuba for violating international sanctions.

The U.S.-Cuba normalization has done little to shake Cuba's close ties
with North Korea. In March 2015, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez
declared that Cuba maintained solidarity with the North Korean regime,
despite Pyongyang's increased international isolation. Rodriguez
justified his stance on the grounds that Cuban foreign policy is based
on upholding just principles and resisting Western interference into the
internal affairs of countries.

While leading North Korea expert Andrei Lankov interpreted these
statements as proof that Cuba's criticisms of U.S. imperialism would
continue unabated despite the normalization, some NK News analysts have
contended that Cuba's show of support for North Korea may be more
rhetorical than substantive. Cuba is mentioned only sporadically by the
North Korean state media, and in a limited range of contexts. This
suggests that the Obama administration's Republican critics may have
overblown the strength of the Havana-Pyongyang bilateral linkage.

Even if the extent of the relationship has been periodically
exaggerated, Cuba's September 2015 and May 2016 reaffirmations of an
alliance with North Korea suggest that the ideological partnership
remains alive and well. South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se's
visit to Cuba for the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) summit on
June 4 and Seoul's open calls for normalization with Cuba are unlikely
to cause illicit trade between Cuba and North Korea to diminish or
become more covert. This is because the symbolic significance of arms
shipments and small-scale trade deals between the two countries still
outweighs the economic benefits Cuba could glean from enhanced South
Korean capital investments.

How Illegal Trade Persists Between Cuba and North Korea

Despite the immense international controversy resulting from Cuba's 2013
arms sales to North Korea, sporadic trade linkages between the two
countries have continued largely unhindered. In January 2016, Cuba and
North Korea developed a barter trade system, which officially involved
transactions of sugar and railway equipment.

According to Curtis Melvin, an expert at the Washington D.C.-based U.S.
Korea Institute, barter trade is an effective way for Cuba and North
Korea to evade international sanctions without depleting their hard
currency reserves. Cuba's use of sugar as a medium of bilateral trade
has close parallels with Myanmar's historical use of rice in exchange
for North Korean military technology assistance. This form of trade has
been vital for the North Korean regime's survival in wake of the Soviet
collapse and more inconsistent patronage from China.

While Cuba's ability to use North Korean railway equipment remains
unclear, NK News reported in January that Kim Jong-un was planning to
modernize the DPRK's railway networks, This development initiative could
result in heavy industry production that can be bartered to Havana.

While trade in civilian goods between Cuba and North Korea appears to be
on the upswing, trade in illicit arms continues to be the most
symbolically potent and controversial form of bilateral trade. A 2013
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report noted
that a large number of North Korean arms brokers speak fluent Spanish.
This language training demonstrates the importance of Cuba as a trade
destination for the DPRK. The SIPRI report notes that Cuban arms dealers
are especially attractive because they can deal with North Korea with a
sense of impunity. This contrasts sharply with a British arms dealer who
faced prison time in 2012 for purchasing North Korean weapons.

While the 2013 incident remains the most recent confirmed incident of
weapons trading between Havana and Pyongyang, recent revelations of a
lost U.S. Hellfire missile turning up in Cuba have sparked fresh
concerns about a revival of the long-standing arms trade.

Cuba has consistently insisted that its arm shipments to the DPRK are
for repair purposes, and therefore do not violate sanctions, which only
ban one-way arms transfers. But Mary O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal
recently speculated that Cuba's intelligence sharing and close
cooperation with the DPRK constituted a highly pernicious blow to the
prospects of U.S.-Cuba normalization.

While the Obama administration has removed Cuba from the state sponsors
of terrorism list and taken a big stride toward lifting the Kennedy-era
embargo on Cuba, Havana's continued cooperation with Pyongyang is an
alarming blow to the normalization process. The current linkage between
anti-Americanism and the Cuban Communist Party's regime security makes a
shift in Havana's North Korea policy unlikely in the short-term. It
remains to be seen if Castro's planned retirement in 2018 will take
Cuban foreign policy in a more pragmatic direction, and allow South
Korean diplomatic overtures to finally be successful.

Samuel Ramani is an MPhil student in Russian and East European Studies
at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford specializing in post-1991
Russian foreign policy. He is also a journalist who writes regularly for
the Washington Post, Huffington Post and Kyiv Post amongst other
publications. He can be followed on Facebook at Samuel Ramani and on
Twitter at samramani2.

Source: The North Korea-Cuba Connection | The Diplomat -
http://thediplomat.com/2016/06/the-north-korea-cuba-connection/