ABANDONED CUBA: RUSSIA’S DOUBLE STANDARDS

To say that Russia has abandoned Cuba is like saying that rain makes you wet. We all know that in this life we must pay attention to actions and their consequences beyond the speeches elegantly crafted for the occasion.

The reader should bear in mind the investment in public relations that Russia must be making to appear that it is not abandoning its ideological ally, because that is the only thing that Cubans and Russians have in common: interests. No one can deny that Cuba was very useful — in geopolitical terms — to Russia. Take, for example, the timely proximity between Cuba and the United States of America.

Let’s be frank, who wouldn’t want to have an ideological bastion at that distance from their adversary?

This led to the famous ‘Missile Crisis’, which fortunately was stopped before a nuclear catastrophe, However, despite the fact that Russia now says one thing and ends up doing another, we cannot deny that there was indeed great support—and not only ideological—from Russia before Castroism’s benefactor adopted that parasitic relationship initiated with Hugo Chávez and continued by Nicolás Maduro with the emergence of Gorbachev’s perestroika.

However, Cuba does not produce sugar today, let alone raw materials such as oil. Nevertheless, Cuba’s real asset over the last twenty years has been tourism, which collapsed with COVID-19. In the last five years, most of the tourists visiting the island were Russian, but why? Well, let’s say that when Russia suffered economic sanctions due to its exit from the SWIFT international banking system, Russian bank cards had a sunny and cheap destination, and that destination was Cuba.

But it is imperative to bear in mind that Cuba did not fully recover the tourism it enjoyed in the pre-pandemic period. The average tourist who considered going to Cuba, let’s say, preferred not to light up with a candle due to the constant power cuts in expensive and impoverished hotels in Havana. Instead of this torture disguised as tourism, the average tourist took a turn to the Dominican Republic.

With all this, I believe that even the Russians have grown tired of Cuban ideological extremism. In fact, they are evacuating their embassy because the island will run out of fuel for its aircraft by approximately 24 February this year. So, the official discourse is one of fraternity while Russia repatriates its embassy, even though it publicly invokes loyalty and fraternity. The truth is that all this is a chronicle of a death foretold for the Castro dictatorship and its regime of terror.

So, what lesson can we learn from Cuba? Well, if you walk fast, you catch up with misfortune, but if you walk slowly, misfortune catches up with you. And I very much doubt that Donald Trump has no interest in overthrowing the Castro regime and going down in history as the great ambassador of future Cuban democracy alongside Marco Rubio. That could save Trump in the upcoming midterm elections.

They say that it is not the law that frightens, but the judge.