Word: barter
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...important part of Soviet foreign policy these days floats to the outside world on a thick black tide of oozing oil. Russian oil salesmen with barter deals in their briefcases stride the sidewalks of Beirut, Colombo and Tokyo. Earnest technicians from Moscow probe the earth in India, Ghana, Cuba and Pakistan to help the locals find petroleum of their own. Fat tankers chug out of the Black Sea toward a score of nations already signed up at bargain-basement prices for Commilube, the fuel of friendship...
...promised to send to Cuba a $250 million aid program, including an oil refinery, a steel mill, power plants. Added the joint communique: in case the U.S. "carries out its threat of not buying more sugar from Cuba," Russia commits itself to purchase 2,700,000 tons at the barter equivalent of 4^ per lb., making 4,000,000 tons in all to the Communist world. The Russian pledges were hedged, e.g., "measures that are possible." Yet the outcome was indisputable: a Soviet commitment to keep Cuba's Communist regime alive, if on short rations...
Before he left for Moscow to sign further deals with the Reds (Castro already has barter agreements with seven Soviet-bloc nations), Guevara went on TV and rendered a treasurer's report written in double red ink. He acknowledged that foreign exchange reserves had fallen from $214 million to $170 million and would probably fall to $100 million by year's end. He warned that "we shall have to look for substitutes" but promised Cubans that the Communist bloc's "perfect planning" would see them through. "Che" might well bring back more big machinery from the East...
...Setting up a "barter" system by which farmers would be paid out of present surpluses for keeping part of their acreage idle; farmers could then sell or feed to livestock the surplus grain they received...
...more than $100 million worth of promised Communist aid-much of it in the form of factories to produce such former U.S. imports as knives, radios, cameras, tubing, flour, cable, screwdrivers, electric motors, hinges, light bulbs, farm machines, printing presses, office equipment, medical instruments. The deal also included a barter exchange-sugar, the nation's major export, for oil, the major import. To refine the Russian crude, Che seized the three foreign refineries-Shell, Esso and Texaco-without compensation...