Over the past week, Russia has taken a number of steps to revive its partnership with the Castro regime in Cuba. Ahead of a visit to Havana last Friday, Putin announced that he was writing off $32 billion of the island’s debt to Moscow, and just Wednesday, Russian media broke the news that Putin would reopen a Soviet-era intelligence facility there:
Opened in 1967, the Lourdes facility was the Soviet Union’s largest foreign base, a mere 155 miles from the US coast. It employed up to 3,000 military and intelligence personnel to intercept a wide array of American telephone and radio communications, but Putin announced its closure in 2001 because it was too expensive – Russia had been paying $200m (£117m) a year in rent – and in response to US demands. … “Lourdes gave the Soviet Union eyes in the whole of the western hemisphere.
Jay Ulfelder expects this revival to delay, but not forestall, Cuba’s economic reckoning:
Putin’s government seems to be responding in kind to what it perceives as a deepening U.S. threat on its own borders, and this is important in its own right. As a specialist on the survival and transformation of authoritarian regimes, though, I am also interested in how this reinvigorated relationship affects prospects for political change in Cuba. …
None of these developments magically resolves the fundamental flaws in Cuba’s political economy, and so far the government shows no signs of rolling back the process of limited liberalization it has already begun. What’s more, Russia also has economic problems of its own, so it’s not clear how much help it can offer and how long it will be able to sustain that support. Even so, these developments probably do shrink the probability that the Cuban economy will tip soon into a deeper crisis, and with it the near-term prospects for a broader political transformation.
