Word: cubans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That situation could change drastically if Cuban troops were to be drawn into the civil war between the Ethiopian regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the well-armed secessionist rebels of Eritrea, or if Cuban units should find themselves in pitched battles against South African or Rhodesian army units. If the amount of Cuban blood spilled in Africa should increase dramatically, Castro might have to resort to officially conscripting soldiers for African duty. Privately, a number of Cuban officials admit that their routing of the Somali invaders of Ethiopia last spring was a walkover, but that there are no more...
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...
...Soviets make a point of appearing to keep away from MINREX, the Ministry of External Relations, as the Cuban State Department is called. Both Moscow and Havana want to generate the impression that Castro calls his own shots in foreign policy...
...Russian ambassador, Nikita Tolubeyev, is a member of the Soviet Central Committee and dean of the diplomatic corps, but he is certainly no high commissioner. He is generally regarded by Cuban and foreign contacts alike as a mostly ornamental, rather ineffectual apparatchik and errand boy. In fact, Tolubeyev has complained to his home office that he has difficulty getting access to Fidel. One reason may be that after more than seven years in Havana, Tolubeyev has yet to learn more than a smattering of Spanish. When Fidel wants to coordinate his signals with the Kremlin, he does so by dispatching...