HAVANA, Cuba. – Russian impotence in the face the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship In Syria it has meant an earthquake of much more than medium intensity for the illusions of late Castroism with Vladimir Putin.
The retreat, with their tails between their legs, of the Russians, who for nine years had been supporting the Syrian tyrant with bombs and cannon shots, must have the bosses here thinking that they “hopefully” trust that Putin is going to get the better of them. of the fire, repairing, with money and gushing oil, the catastrophe of hunger and blackouts that they caused with their proverbial incompetence and bungling.
Seeing the lurch in which Putin left the al-Assad regime – too busy with the war in Ukraine – must make them feel less secure, as they felt confident of having, thanks to their strategic alliance with the Russian Federation, a great empire. behind. It doesn’t matter if the tsar’s flag flies over the intercontinental hypersonic missiles and atomic submarines today instead of the red rag with the hammer and sickle.
The bosses of late Castroism, knowing they are counting down, bristle with gossip about the probability that when Trump and Putin negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine, the Russians will give up Cuba, with its geostrategic importance and all, in exchange for staying with Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk and that kyiv does not join NATO.
We’ll have to see what happens, because in haggling between superpowers, you never know…
These days the older Castroites must be remembering their disappointments in love with the Russians: the songs of “Nikita, ladybugwhat is given is not taken away” when despite Fidel Castro’s prank, Khrushchev took the nuclear rockets in October 1962; Gorbachev’s Perestroika that left them without subsidies, hanging by the brush, and to top it off, the withdrawal of the Lourdes base.
The older Castroites and less versed in geopolitics, who have not quite adapted to the idea that the Soviet Union ceased to exist 33 years ago and continue to long for the rude hug of the Siberian bear, would prefer, rather than disappointments, to evoke that 13 February 1960, when Foreign Minister Anastas Mikoyán arrived in Havana to sign a commercial treaty that linked us so umbilically to the Soviet Union that in the Constitution of 1976 we had to swear eternal fidelity to it.
But the immobile old men and other fossils of communist orthodoxy that remain in the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the PCC are not deceived like the handful of idiots who still believe that the Russia that attacks Ukraine and aspires to rebuild the tsarist empire is still the Soviet Union. They know that today’s Russia is capitalist and ultra-conservative and that Putin, more akin to fascism than communism, the only thing he has in common with the communists is contempt for democracy and hatred of the United States and the West. It is enough for it to be your ally, although its reliability has limits.
The formula to revive the Cuban economy announced three years ago by the Stolypin Institute, similar to the one applied after the collapse of the Soviet Union, produced more noise than nothing. And the “comprehensive solutions” begged from the Kremlin by Miguel Díaz-Canel and other officials of his regime to get out of the dead end to which their clumsiness, stubbornness and fear of losing power have led them have not yet materialized.
But the bosses, with no other nail to hold on to, determined to accept whatever Moscow demands of them, continue betting on the Russification of post-Fidelista continuity. They dream that Russia will definitively forgive Cuba’s millionaire debt, resume collaboration projects, modernize the country’s dilapidated infrastructure, especially the electrical energy system, supply cheap oil, wheat, raw materials, machinery, weapons and guarantee that they come to vacation. tourists, many Russian tourists.
If Fidel Castro were resurrected, he would probably advise his successors not to trust the Russians too much.
