Bear Hug from a Sugar Daddy

Fidel Castro likes to rail at the evils of colonialism, but Cuba itself is in one vital respect the complacent ward of an imperialist nation. Without aid from its superpower sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy would sink beneath the Caribbean waves.

The U.S.S.R. and its East European allies buy three-fourths of Cuba's sugar for about 400 per lb., vs. a world price of 90. In return, the Soviets sell Cuba nearly all the oil it burns, at $14 per bbl., about one-third below the world price The Soviets and the Eastern bloc also buy most of Cuba's nickel, its other major export, at prices about 50% higher than world levels, and fund most of Cuba's industrial development. Projects financed by the U.S.S.R. supply 30% of all Cuba's electricity, 95% of its steel and every last pound of its sheet metal All together Soviet aid has doubled since 1976 to about $3 billion a year.

The help has not made Cuba rich. TIME Correspondent George Taber who was recently in Havana, reports that the city is a nostalgia buffs paradise: DeSoto, Packard and Studebaker cars roam the streets, kept running by tinkering mechanics. Gardens of homes in the once fashionable sections of Miramar and Vedado are overrun with weeds or chickens, and the housing shortage is so severe that Cubans often wait three or four years for an apartment Almost everything is rationed, including sugar and cigars. In fact, though Castro once dreamed of a diversified economy, Cuba has become even more of a one-crop country. In 1959, the year of Castro's triumph, sugar accounted for 74% of Cuba's exports; today the figure is 85%.

Cubans are proud of their revolutionary achievements in health and education, but they occasionally grumble about their dependence on the U.S.S.R. The Castro regime has been moving away from pure Communism and flirting with supply-and-demand economics. There are new incentive programs for workers and a plan to pay interest on small savings accounts. Castro has also dropped hints in recent months about resuming trade with the U S which had been an overpowering force in the Cuban economy until Washington imposed a total embargo in the early 1960s. Washington's reply: no deal unless Cuba withdraws its troops from Africa.

Meanwhile, the Soviet bear hug gets more choking. Cuba's African adventures probably were Castro's own idea, but he never could have carried them out without Soviet help. And there is no doubt that the Soviet economic embrace sharply limits any aspirations to independence that Castro might have In the late '60s, Havana was getting restive: unlike other Soviet clients it refused to break relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967; it continued to trade with Franco's Spain and sharply criticized some Soviet policies in Latin America. In early 1968, Moscow retaliated by delaying some oil shipments to Cuba. By no coincidence, Castro then went on Cuban television to endorse the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Since then he has conformed Havana's foreign policy to Moscow's wishes.

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