By Juan O. Tamayo, jtamayo@herald.com. January 3, 2000. Miami Herald
Deemed tool against Fidel
For many Cuban exiles, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was their best hope for toppling Cuban President Fidel Castro. It was Yeltsin who ended Moscow's mammoth subsidies to Cuba in 1991 and backed an unprecedented U.N. assault on its human rights record.
But those steps by Yeltsin, and the economic meltdown they triggered on the island, could not loosen the Cuban president's grip on power.
The late Jorge Mas Canosa, then chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, began cultivating Yeltsin even before he was elected president in 1991. He arranged for Yeltsin to visit Miami during a U.S. tour in 1989, when Yeltsin was a maverick member of the Soviet Parliament.
Two years later, when Yeltsin had taken the reins in Moscow, Mas Canosa visited the Russian capital. He urged Yeltsin to cut off subsidies to Havana estimated at nearly $6 billion a year and opened a CANF office in Moscow.
Mas Canosa offered to arrange cheaper replacements for Cuban sugar sales to Moscow, and even to finance the construction of housing in Russia for Soviet troops then stationed in Cuba.
Yeltsin's government shut off the last of the subsidies to Havana -- trade and military sales loans that were never repaid -- by the end of that year and put all commercial transactions on a strictly market-price basis.
Russian oil imports, the mainstay of Cuba's energy needs, plunged from a high of 13 million tons a year in the 1980s to 840,000 tons in 1998. Russia stopped financing 84 development projects in Cuba, including the Juragua nuclear power plant, and its troops began withdrawing from the island.
ECONOMY FALTERS
The cutoff sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin, causing it to shrink by 35 to 40 percent by 1994 and forcing Castro to put in place a brutal emergency belt-tightening he euphemistically called a ``Special Period in Time of Peace.
Hundreds of factories shut down, cars and trucks virtually disappeared from streets and power outages became daily occurrences, fueling discontent that erupted in street protests in the summers of 1993 and 1994.
Russia added insult to the strained Moscow-Havana relations when it joined a 1992 vote at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva to condemn Cuba's human rights abuses, even hosting a cocktail for exile activists.
But Yeltsin's contacts with Cuban exiles cooled as advocates of Russia's return to great-power status began pushing for stronger relations with the last Communist government in the Western Hemisphere in mid-1992.
Russia agreed to pay Cuba $200 million a year, in military equipment, for the right to use the Lourdes electronic spying station outside Havana and dropped all earlier talk of recovering Havana's debt to Moscow.
CANF closed its Moscow office in 1993.
Last year, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov met with Cuban officials during a trip to Venezuela to discuss stepping up oil sales to Havana in exchange for increased Cuban sugar exports to Moscow.
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov visited Havana in September to warm up the diplomatic side of Russian-Cuban relations, telling a news conference at trip's end that ``relations are now on the rise.
SHALLOW POCKETS
But Moscow is simply too bankrupt to consider resuming significant subsidies to Havana, with or without Yeltsin.
An agreement reached in May calls for Russia to sell 1.6 million tons of crude oil and petroleum products to Cuba in the next 12 months, nearly double the 1998 figure. But the deal, Moscow's announcement said, would be the last negotiated on a government-to-government basis because Russia now
has ``enough private businessmen to carry out such contracts'' on a strictly cash-and-carry basis.
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