Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While Fidel Castro has his own reasons for sending Cubans to Africa, he could not do so without huge and constant transfusions of Soviet aid. Western experts estimate that Russia now pumps the equivalent of about $6 million a day into Cuba. That figure includes outright grants, subsidies and technical aid. The U.S.S.R. sells Cuba 190,000 bbl. of oil per day at about half the world price and buys 3.5 million tons per year of Cuban sugar at four times the world price (currently 7? per lb.), paying partly with what Cuba needs most: hard currency...
...Cuba also gets virtually all of its formidable military arsenal free from the Soviet Union. Fifty Soviet pilots are flying defense patrols for the Cuban air force. Soviet technicians are everywhere; there are more than 400 at one nickel mining and processing facility in eastern Cuba. Teams of Russian electrical specialists have fanned out around the countryside to erect high-tension wires as part of a new nationwide power grid. The Russians are involved in every section of Cuban industry and agriculture and most government ministries, notably including the Ministry of Interior and its espionage branch, the DGI (General Directorate...
...large Soviet presence in Cuba -approximately 8,000 civilians and 2,000 military advisers-is more tolerated than welcomed by most Cubans...
...luxury apartments and hotels, many of which were built with American Mafia money in the '50s, and they venture out into the city in busloads to storm the few stores where there is anything to buy. The Russians also have a reputation for showing ill-disguised contempt toward Cuba's large black and mulatto population. At a May 5 town meeting in Spokane, Wash., President Carter commented that Soviet adventurism in Africa is doomed to fail because of the Russians' "innate racism." Says one Cuban pointedly: "I object to Carter's use of the word...
...indispensable allies. The central fact of Cuban economic life is the 16-year-old U.S. trade embargo, or "blockade," as the Cubans call it. One of the political realities that make Castro's brand of totalitarianism easier for the Cubans to accept is the looming hostility of Cuba's giant neighbor to the north...